What Microsoft changed when Nadella pushed learn-it-all

Satya Nadella took over a 40-year-old Microsoft in 2014 and treated culture as the way the company would keep producing new ideas. Microsoft's account of the years after that calls the shift a growth mindset. He warned employees against becoming world-weary know-it-alls, and he urged them to be passionate, open-minded learn-it-alls.

The Garage story is Microsoft's write-up. Nadella was the third chief executive, fresh from the cloud business, and he wanted that stance across the company. The Garage grew from a Redmond makerspace into what the account calls the official portal for a hacking culture. Jeff Ramos, its general manager, says every person at Microsoft can come up with a good idea. The account lists a dozen sites, including Ireland, Israel, India, New York and Atlanta.

The Hackathon is where the stance meets the calendar. People from across the company pick a project, and a failed attempt is not a mark against a career or a quarter. Susie Kandzor, director of hacking, puts the scoring in plain words. "Projects that don't work out are not considered losing projects," she said. "That's learning a new skill. That's working with people from across the company." Nadella tried replacing the company meeting with the Hackathon. Linda Thackeray, who ran the first global one, said 2014 was planned for 1,500 to 2,000 people and drew 11,000. "Instead of executives standing on a stage talking to employees, it was employees showing the whole company what is possible," she said. The 2020 event, online because of COVID-19, drew over 70,000 people. The account calls it the largest private hackathon on the planet.

The write-up names the Xbox Adaptive Controller, Eye Control for Windows 10, and Seeing AI as projects with Garage roots, plus FarmBeats from a 2015 hackathon. Kandzor's later line is the one a culture programme rarely gets on paper. "The changes started showing up faster than many expected," she said, and the Garage and the Hackathon were central to putting the growth mindset into practice. Another company can pick up the rules without copying a 70,000-person event.

1. Score a stopped attempt as learning, in the review and not only in the speech. Kandzor's version is a new skill and time spent with people from another team. If the page only lists what shipped, the learn-it-all line stays on the wall. Put one attempt that stopped beside the wins.

2. Give the main internal hour to the people who did the trying. Nadella's experiment let the Hackathon stand in for the company meeting. Thackeray's figures, a plan of 1,500 to 2,000 that became 11,000, are the response on record, and her description is the part worth copying: employees showing what is possible, executives in the audience.

3. Keep a standing place. The account argues that The Garage became the year-round form of the Hackathon, with space, tools, and HackBox to match people by challenge, role, product and customer. A named corner and a recurring block of time will do more of that job than a single offsite.

4. Ask the person who assumes the invitation is for someone else. Kandzor's reply to "I'm not a hacker" was to ask if they were passionate, then to tell them to make a proof of concept. The products named above include tools for people whose bodies do not match the default device. That range came from letting more kinds of employees start.

Ramos says customers now ask how Microsoft drives a culture change. For years the answer he describes was that the work was more art than science, and the account says the company has been writing the practice down. Another team can start with one boundary the work has to cross, and a review that recognises an attempt that stopped.

A design thinking session is a place for an intact team to take one customer problem across the usual boundary and leave with a proof of concept they can show.