The Customer-Driven Culture Book Summary

Book Summary

By Travis Lowdermilk and Monty Hammontree

15 min

Audio available

Brief Summary

Lowdermilk and Hammontree prove in their exploration of the 2013 Microsoft takeover that a customer-driven culture will boost profits, enhance workplace culture, and benefit both employees and consumers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s three principles for changing culture (awareness, curiosity, and courage) along with six hacks to implement cultural shifts provide a framework for management to replicate Microsoft’s success.

About the Author

Travis Lowdermilk is an author and user experience designer and researcher at Microsoft.

Monty Hammontree is the director of user experience research for Microsoft’s development tools division.

Topics

Entrepreneurship

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Key Insights

In 2013, Microsoft was suffering from a bad reputation and a rigid corporate culture. When Microsoft’s third CEO Satya Nadella took over, he made the decision to transform Microsoft using a customer-centric focus. Using three main principles (“awareness, curiosity, and courage”) and six culture-transforming hacks, Nadella brought Microsoft back from the brink and made the Fortune 500 company more valuable than ever. These culture-transforming hacks include shifts in leadership development, data usage and management, communication, and learning from mistakes.

In 2013, Microsoft’s corporate culture was in the midst of a civil war.

In 2013, Microsoft’s global reputation was at an all-time low. Consumers and critics alike saw Microsoft as an evil, greedy corporation with no interest in providing for customers or meeting their needs. The company was an antiquated and grumpy vestige of the early days of tech - it was still a front-runner based on name recognition and assets alone.

Internally, Microsoft’s culture was equally abysmal. Different departments were at war with each other, competing for recognition and praise. The focus was on arbitrary accolades, rather than making a good product, and it showed.

As the new CEO, Satya Nadella focused on changing corporate culture by championing awareness, curiosity, and courage.

In 2013, the cultural transformation began. The effort was lead by new CEO Satya Nadella, and the Developer Divison (DevDiv), which was already embarking on a department-wide shift in principles when Nadella arrived. With Nadella’s arrival, a new question was posed to Microsoft management: “What culture do we want to foster?”

The focus on culture, rather than assets or products, was new for Microsoft. But Nadella was certain that culture would drive success. Nadella rewrote Microsoft’s mission statement with a focus on customer satisfaction. The new statement was simple: “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Because DevDiv was already working to transform workplace culture, they became the testing grounds for the new style of management. The focus was on learning, empathizing with customers, and collaboration.

In order to change Microsoft’s culture, Nadella focused on three main principles: awareness, curiosity, and courage. Developing a customer-driven culture means being aware of what products can do, quantifying and codifying their value, and testing for accuracy. It requires curiosity to try new things, and embrace the ideas of consumers. And finally, it takes courage. When experimenting with new products and shifting the paradigm of a 100,000 person workforce, mistakes will be made and projects will fail. Having the courage to try, fail, and try again is a pivotal part of a customer-driven culture.

But how did Nadella actually change the culture at Microsoft? Like software development, there are certain hacks managers can use to reduce strain while navigating cultural shifts at work. Lowdermilk and Hammontree, who witnessed the changes at Microsoft under Nadella, speak on the six hacks that he used to bring Microsoft back from the dead.