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Satya Narayana Nadella Edit Profile

Businessman engineer executive

Satya Nadella is an Indian-American engineer and the current CEO of Microsoft. Nadella led many projects including the company’s move to cloud computing and the development of one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world. Nadella has implemented a variety of changes to the company, which has seen a massive improvement in stock position since the change of power.

Background

Satya Nadella was born on August 19, 1967, in Hyderabad, India, to Bukkapuram Nadella Yugandher and Prabhavati Yugandhar. His father was a member of the Indian Administrative Service. His mother was a Sanskrit lecturer.

Education

From a young age, Satya Nadella showed great interest in building things and enhancing the lives of people through technological developments. He pursued his primary education at the Hyderabad Public School, located in the Begumpet region of the city. He then moved to the prestigious Manipal Institute of Technology, located in the Manipal town of Karnataka.

In 1988, Nadella graduated from this renowned institution and was thinking of moving out of the country to pursue his higher studies. He then got admitted to the reputed University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee located in the United States to pursue his Masters of Science degree. He then graduated from the renowned university in 1990.

His desire to excel in the corporate world also motivated Nadella to move to one of the best business schools in the world, the Booth School of Business affiliated to the University of Chicago. He received a Master of Business Administration degree from this prestigious institution.

Career

Nadella began his post-college career at Sun Microsystems, a company that sold computers, software, and information technology services. There he worked as a member of its technology staff. He was lured away from Sun in 1992 to join Microsoft, where he initially worked on the development of Windows NT, a landmark operating system that was aimed primarily at business users.

Nadella started climbing the corporate ladder steadily while working at Microsoft. He then went on to make important decisions in the interest of the firm. He was one of the few employees who suggested the concept of cloud computing to the firm. Eventually, the company dedicated a lot of its time and resources to the development of this technology. The result was the germination of one of the world’s largest cloud-based entities, named Microsoft Azure.

While working full-time at Microsoft, Nadella also earned (1997) a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago.

Nadella secured his first executive role in 2000 as vice president of Microsoft bCentral, which was a set of web services for small businesses that included hosted website-hosting and email. In 2001 Nadella got a promotion to corporate Vice President of Microsoft Business Solutions. This group was formed through a number of acquisitions, including Great Plains, a company that made accounting software for small and midsize businesses. The group was also working on a project to build a cloud-based CRM. These products were eventually rebranded as Dynamics.

In 2007 he was elevated to senior vice president of research and development for the company’s online services division, which not only put him in charge of Bing but the early versions of Microsoft Office and Xbox Live as well. Nadella then moved to the Systems and Tools division of Microsoft and was even appointed its president. The annual turnover of Microsoft contributed by this segment of the business alone is said to be around $20 billion today.

Nadella was also an executive vice president in charge of the company’s cloud computing platform, which provided the infrastructure for such Microsoft offerings as the online search engine Bing, the Xbox Live broadband gaming network, and the Office 365 subscription-based services.

Nadella officially became CEO of the company on February 4, 2014, after the previous head, Steve Ballmer, announced his resignation in August 2013. Ballmer and Bill Gates picked Nadella to pull the company up from the hard times that had hit.

One of Nadella’s first major tasks was overseeing the completion of Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia Corp.’s mobile-device business, a transaction that had been announced in 2013 despite the reservations of various Microsoft executives, one of whom reportedly was Nadella. Shortly after the deal closed in April 2014, he announced the largest layoff in Microsoft’s history; 18,000 positions were eliminated, the majority of which involved Nokia. In 2016 Nadella oversaw the acquisition of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking Web site.

In 2017 Nadella released his first book, Hit Refresh. The book’s descriptions state that it’s about "the quest to rediscover Microsoft’s soul and imagine a better future for everyone."

In the years since becoming CEO, Nadella is concerned to be one of the best executives, with Microsoft stock having tripled by September 2018, with a 27% annual growth rate. In December 2018, he was named the best CEO of a large company in the United States, citing anonymous Nadella employee reviews.

Achievements

  • Achievement  of Satya Nadella

    One of Nadella’s greatest accomplishments was pioneering the Cloud computing division of Microsoft. The annual turnover contributed by this division of the business was $16.6 Billion in 2011, when he was just appointed its head. In a matter of three years, the turnover saw a significant increase to around $20.6 Billion.

    Hard work and determination never go unnoticed and this is evident in Satya Nadella’s career graph. In the last few years, Satya Nadella has held a number of positions, including that of the Senior Vice-President of the Research and Development group for the Online Services Division, Vice-President of the Microsoft Business Division, and the President of the Server and Tools Division.

    Since taking over as a CEO, Microsoft's stock has increased by more than 150%. After helping generate billions in profit in two years between 2011 and 2013, he received a payment of $84.5 million in 2016. According to Equilar's 200 highest-paid CEO rankings, Satya Nadella is the highest-paid tech CEO in the United States. The Microsoft CEO ranks at No. 4 on the overall list with a yearly compensation of $84,308,755. This includes a base salary of $918,917, along with $3,600,000 in cash bonus and $12,729 in perks.

    In 2019, Nadella was named Person of the Year by the Financial Times. He was also awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman (Overseas Indian Honour/Award) for business management by the Government of India in 2015.

Views

Nadella believes fiercely in giving back. According to the Times of India, Nadella is a huge inspiration for students at his alma mater. Hyderabad Public School was the first school to be selected for the I-spark program, which utilized Microsoft materials and software to help young Indian students jump-start careers in tech. Nadella has also met with government officials about improving IT education in schools across India.

Nadella is a board member of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a member of the board of trustees at the University of Chicago. All the proceeds from his book Hit Refresh were given to Microsoft Philanthropies.

Quotations: "Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn."

"Our ambitions are bold and so must be our desire to change and evolve our culture."

"If you are going to have a risk-taking culture, you can't really look at every failure as a failure, you've got to be able to look at the failure as a learning opportunity."

"I marvel every day at how people can excel - and that’s what really gets me going."

"It showed me that you must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe."

"Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place."

"Learning to fly is not pretty but flying is."

Personality

When he is not caught with his business commitments, Nadella likes to unwind by reading poetry. He is also really fond of cricket and attributes the sport as one of the reasons behind his leadership abilities.

Nadella is a big fan of cricket. In fact, he was a part of his school’s cricket team. In an interview with Hyderabad's Deccan Chronicle, he said that playing cricket taught him about teamwork and leadership. He’s also a life-long learner. He often signs up for online courses in free time.

During his music classes, Nadella was interested in learning new songs rather than playing instruments and loved Western songs, particularly those of the Beatles. Satya Nadella enjoys poetry. His profile on Microsoft's official website lists reading poetry as one of his hobbies. He is also a passionate runner.

Quotes from others about the person

  • "Satya has charted a course for making the most of the opportunities created by technology while also facing up to the hard questions." - Bill Gates

Interests

  • Writers

    American and Indian poetry, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee, Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg, The Great Convergence by Richard Baldwin, Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown, Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

  • Sport & Clubs

    cricket, soccer, football, Seattle Seahawks

  • Music & Bands

    The Beatles

Connections

Satya Nadella married his schoolmate Anupama in 1992, the same year he joined Microsoft. The two have three children - a son and two daughters - and live in Bellevue, Washington.

Father:
Bukkapuram Nadella Yugandhar
Bukkapuram Nadella Yugandhar - Father of Satya Nadella

Mother:
Prabhavati Yugandhar

Spouse:
Anupama Nadella
Anupama Nadella - Spouse of Satya Nadella

Daughter:
Divya Nadella

Son:
Zain Nadella

Daughter:
Tara Nadella

mentor:
Bill Gates
Bill Gates - mentor of Satya Nadella

After being named CEO, Satya Nadella got Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as his mentor. The other significant announcement that Microsoft made, other than naming Nadella as CEO, was regarding the resignation of Bill Gates as Microsoft's chairman.