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      My learning during this time was greatly accelerated by the hiring of Dr. Qi Lu as head of all online services at Microsoft. Qi had been an executive at Yahoo and was intensely recruited throughout Silicon Valley. Steve, Harry Shum, today our head of AI and research, and I had gone down to the Bay Area to spend an afternoon talking to Qi. On the flight back Steve said to me, “We should get him, but if you don’t want to work for him, that will be a problem.” Having just met with Qi, I knew that he was someone from whom I could learn a lot and Microsoft could benefit. So, I did not hesitate in supporting the hiring of Qi to Microsoft, even though in some sense it was stalling my own promotion. I realized that my own professional growth would come from working for and learning from Qi during my time in our online business. Later Qi would become an important member of my senior leadership team during the first few years I was CEO. Qi eventually left the company, but he continues to be a trusted friend and advisor.

      Over time, Yahoo integrated Bing as its search engine, and together we powered a quarter of all U.S. searches. The search engine that many had said should be shuttered in its early days of struggle continued to win an expanding share of the market, and today it is a profitable multi-billion-dollar business for Microsoft. Just as important, though, was how it helped to jump-start our move to the cloud.

      As was so often the case at Microsoft, there were other experiments elsewhere in the company aimed at the same problem, leading to internal competition and even fiefdoms. Since 2008, Ray Ozzie had been incubating a highly secretive cloud infrastructure product with the code name Red Dog. A longtime Microsoft reporter, Mary Jo Foley, came across a job advertisement for a Red Dog engineer and wrote a piece speculating that this project must be Microsoft’s answer to Amazon’s AWS.

      At some point during my time at Bing, I met with the Red Dog team to explore how we might work together. I quickly realized that Microsoft’s storied server and tools business (STB), where products like Windows Server and SQL Server had been invented and built and where Red Dog was housed, was worlds apart from Bing. STB was Microsoft’s third largest group by revenue after Office and Windows. They were the deep distributed systems experts. But when I contrasted STB with Bing a few things were apparent. They lacked the feedback loop that comes from running an at-scale cloud service. I realized that they were caught up in the local maxima of servicing their existing customer base and were not learning fast enough about the new world of cloud services. And the Red Dog team was a side effort that was ignored by the mainstream of the STB leadership and organization.

      In late 2010, Ray Ozzie announced in a long internal memo that he was leaving Microsoft. He wrote in his departure email, “The one irrefutable truth is that in any large organization, any transformation that is to ‘stick’ must come from within.” While Red Dog was still in incubation and had booked little revenue, he was correct that the transformation of Microsoft would come from within. Steve had already proclaimed that the company was all-in on the cloud, having invested $8.7 billion in research and development, much of it focused on cloud technologies. But even though engineers were working on cloud-related technologies, a clear vision of a Microsoft cloud platform had not yet surfaced—to say nothing of a real-world revenue stream.

      Right around that time, Steve asked that I lead STB, which today has evolved into Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise business. I was given this news of my new role not even a week before I got the job. Steve had a sense that we needed to move faster to the cloud. He had personally and aggressively driven the transformation of our Office business to the cloud. He wanted us to be equally bold when it came to cloud infrastructure. When I took over our fledgling cloud business in January 2011, analysts estimated that cloud revenues were already multi-billions of dollars with Amazon in the lead and Microsoft nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, revenues from our cloud services could be counted in the millions, not the billions. Although Amazon did not report its AWS revenues in those days, they were the clear leader, building a huge business without any real challenge from Microsoft. In his annual letter to shareholders in April 2011, just as I was beginning my new role, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gleefully offered a short course on the computer science and economics underlying their burgeoning cloud enterprise. He wrote about Bayesian estimators, machine learning, pattern recognition, and probabilistic decision making. “The advances in data management developed by Amazon engineers have been the starting point for the architectures underneath the cloud storage and data management services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS),” he wrote. Amazon was leading a revolution and we had not even mustered our troops. Years earlier I had left Sun Microsystems to help Microsoft capture the lead in the enterprise market, and here we were once again far behind.

      As a company, we’d been very publicly missing the mobile revolution, but we were not about to miss the cloud. I would miss working with colleagues at Bing, but I was excited to lead what I sensed would be the biggest transformation of Microsoft in a generation—our journey to the cloud. I had spent three years, from 2008 to 2011, learning the cloud—pressure-testing its infrastructure, operations, and economics—but as a user, not as a provider of the cloud. That experience would enable me to execute with speed in my new role.

      But it wouldn’t be easy. The server and tools business was at the peak of its commercial success and yet it was missing the future. The organization was deeply divided over the importance of the cloud business. There was constant tension between diverging forces. On the one hand, the division’s leaders would say, “Yes, there is this cloud thing,” and “Yes, we should incubate it,” but, on the other hand, they would quickly shift to warning, “Remember, we’ve got to focus on our server business.” The servers that had made STB a force within Microsoft and the industry, namely Windows Server and SQL Server, were now holding them back, discouraging them from innovating and growing with the times.

      Shortly after I took over, the company issued this statement: “Nadella and his team are tasked with leading Microsoft’s enterprise transformation into the cloud and providing the technology roadmap and vision for the future of business computing.” Steve had said the transformation would not happen overnight, but we were running out of time.

      I had a very good idea about where we needed to go, but I realized that my real task was to motivate the pride and desire in the STB leaders to go there with me. Sure, I had a point of view, but I also recognized this was a team that cared deeply about enterprises, those customers with exacting and sophisticated computing needs. I wanted to build on their institutional knowledge and so I set out first to learn from the team I was to lead, and, hopefully, to earn the team’s respect. Only then could we go boldly together to a new and better place.

      Leadership means making choices and then rallying the team around those choices. One thing I had learned from my dad’s experience as a senior Indian government official was that few tasks are more difficult than building a lasting institution. The choice of leading through consensus versus fiat is a false one. Any institution-building comes from having a clear vision and culture that works to motivate progress both top-down and bottom-up.

      In business school I had read Young Men and Fire, a book by Norman Maclean (best known for A River Runs Through It). It tells the story of a tragic forest fire that killed thirteen “smokejumpers” (parachuting firefighters) in 1949 and the investigation that followed. What I remembered was the lesson that went unheeded: the urgent need to build shared context, trust, and credibility with your team. The lead firefighter, who ultimately escaped the blaze, knew that he had to build a small fire in order to escape the bigger fire. But no one would follow him. He had the skills to get his men out of harm’s way, but he hadn’t built the shared context needed to make his leadership effective. His team paid the ultimate price.

      I was determined not to make the same mistake.

      Like that lead firefighter, I had to convince my team to adapt a counterintuitive strategy—to shift focus from the big server and tools business that paid everyone’s salary to the tiny cloud business with almost no revenue. To win their support, I needed to build shared context. I decided not to bring my old team from Bing with me. It was important that the transformation come from within, from the core. It’s the only way to make change sustainable.

      The team I inherited was more like a group of individuals. The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island,” but he’d

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