Microsoft’s New CEO Needs An Editor

Personally I would have trouble respecting and following the lead of a person who spoke with this level of apparently deliberate obfuscation and non-inform speak.

To me, it, appears to be an attempt to deceive rather than enlighten, and it certainly wouldn't give me a good attitude nor make me feel better about the company.

But I don't work for those kind of companies, and maybe the people who do have a high tolerance for this kind of behavior by now. I guess it beats a guy walking around the halls swinging a baseball bat and dashing about the stage like a wild man during company pep rallies.

Eh, they're useful if you're changing a culture or if your organisation exists within a larger framework.

For example, the 2gether NHS Foundation Trust (a Mental Heath trust for Gloucestershire and Hereford) has trust values. The first is "Seeing things from the service user's perspective". This sounds uncontroversial and obvious hut many people (clinicians (in and out of MH); social workers; police; teachers; etc) who come into contact with people with MH problems are ignorant to the point of bigotry and so it's a useful value to have, to remind staff that often people who are saying odd things are not doing so as a function of illness, but because it is their actual lived experience.

One quick examples:

When I say I don't think Heath House Hospital in Bristol ("Bristol Priory") is safe partly because of the Robert Mugabe torturer it sounds like a feature of illness. But actually, Heath House hospital did employ someone who had illegally entered the UK and was using forged documents, and that person used to work for Mugabe as a torturer.

Great article. Not just for its crisp analysis of what Nadella did wrong, but even more so for how he could have expressed his thoughts clearly and gotten it right.

Essentially, this article is complaining that Nadella is playing politics. When you're dependent on mass complicity, boasting airy platitudes and leaving the plan publicly undefined (that is, saying a bunch of stuff that's impossible to disagree with) is the only way to succeed. You don't become CEO of Microsoft by being a political ignoramus. Nadella knew this would go public and is using it to project the image the company wishes to attain for itself. It doesn't matter if it's real or not, the mere act of repetition does much to reinforce the belief in the audience's mind.

I've learned that the most successful C-levels will almost never commit anything substantive to writing. Send them an email looking for direction and it's always, "Let's talk about that tomorrow". There are a lot of strong political reasons for that.

then said author would need to brush up on their own writing skills.