作者：Satya Nadella
出版社：HarperBusiness
副标题：The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
发行时间：2017-9-26
来源：下载的 epub 版本

《刷新：重新发现商业与未来》已经正式发行了，才想起来《Hit Refresh》还被我压在箱底，中文版发现有钱颖一作序，赶紧拿出来拜读，微软自从 Satya 担任 CEO 以后，文化和气质有很大的变化，在开源世界的口碑也开始洗白，通读以后也大致了解了脉络，钦佩有加

全书的概要：

In these pages, you will follow three distinct storylines. First, as prologue, I’ll share my own transformation moving from India to my new home in America with stops in the heartland, in Silicon Valley, and at a Microsoft then in its ascendancy. Part two focuses on hitting refresh at Microsoft as the unlikely CEO who succeeded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Microsoft’s transformation under my leadership is not complete, but I am proud of our progress. In the third and final act, I’ll take up the argument that a Fourth Industrial Revolution lies ahead, one in which machine intelligence will rival that of humans. We’ll explore some heady questions. What will the role of humans become? Will inequality resolve or worsen? How can governments help? What is the role of multinational corporations and their leaders? How will we hit refresh as a society?

摘录：

Despite all this rapid change in the computing industry, we are still at the beginning of the digital revolution. Take artificial intelligence (AI) as an example. Think of all the time we spend manually organizing and performing mundane activities, from scheduling meetings to paying the bills. In the future, an AI agent will know that you are at work and have ten minutes free, and then help you accomplish something that is high on your to-do list. AI is on the verge of making our lives more productive and creative.

Being a husband and a father has taken me on an emotional journey. It has helped me develop a deeper understanding of people of all abilities and of what love and human ingenuity can accomplish. As part of this journey I also discovered the teachings of India’s most famous son—Gautama Buddha. I am not particularly religious, but I was searching and I was curious why so few people in India have been followers of Buddha despite his origins. I discovered Buddha did not set out to found a world religion. He set out to understand why one suffers. I learned that only through living life’s ups and downs can you develop empathy; that in order not to suffer, or at least not to suffer so much, one must become comfortable with impermanence.

This is a book about transformation—one that is taking place today inside me and inside of our company, driven by a sense of empathy and a desire to empower others. But most important, it’s about the change coming in every life as we witness the most transformative wave of technology yet—one that will include artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing. It’s about how people, organizations, and societies can and must transform—hit refresh—in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas, relevance, and renewal. At the core, it’s about us humans and the unique quality we call empathy, which will become ever more valuable in a world where the torrent of technology will disrupt the status quo like never before. The mystical Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that “the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” As much as elegant computer code for machines, existential poetry can illuminate and instruct us. Speaking to us from another century, Rilke is saying that what lies ahead is very much within us, determined by the course each of us takes today. That course, those decisions, is what I’ve set out to describe.

In these pages, you will follow three distinct storylines. First, as prologue, I’ll share my own transformation moving from India to my new home in America with stops in the heartland, in Silicon Valley, and at a Microsoft then in its ascendancy. Part two focuses on hitting refresh at Microsoft as the unlikely CEO who succeeded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Microsoft’s transformation under my leadership is not complete, but I am proud of our progress. In the third and final act, I’ll take up the argument that a Fourth Industrial Revolution lies ahead, one in which machine intelligence will rival that of humans. We’ll explore some heady questions. What will the role of humans become? Will inequality resolve or worsen? How can governments help? What is the role of multinational corporations and their leaders? How will we hit refresh as a society?

Even so, my earliest memories are of my mom struggling to continue her profession and to make the marriage work. She was the constant, steadying force in my life, and my father was larger than life. He nearly immigrated to the United States, a faraway place that represented opportunity, on a Fulbright fellowship to pursue a PhD in economics. But those plans were suddenly and understandably shelved when he was selected to join the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). It was early 1960s, and Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s first prime minister following Gandhi’s historic movement, which had achieved independence from Great Britain. For that generation entering the civil service and being part of the birth of a new nation was a true dream come true. The IAS was essentially a remnant of the old Raj system left by the British to govern after the UK turned over control of the country in 1947. Only about a hundred young professionals per year were selected for the IAS, and so at a very young age my father was administering a district with millions of people. Throughout my childhood, he was posted in many districts across the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. I remember moving from place to place, growing up in the sixties and early seventies in old colonial buildings in the middle of nowhere with lots of time and space, and in a country being transformed.
My mom did her level best during all these disruptions to maintain her teaching career, raise me, and be a loving wife. When I was about six, my five-month-old sister died. It had a huge impact on me and our family. Mom had to give up working after that. I think my sister’s death was the last straw. Losing her, combined with raising me and working to maintain a career while my father was working in faraway places was just too much. She never complained to me at all about it, but I reflect on her story quite a bit, especially in the context of today’s diversity conversations across the technology industry. Like anyone, she wanted to, and deserved to, have it all. But the culture of her workplace, coupled with the social norms of Indian society at the time, didn’t make it possible for her to balance family life with her professional passions.
Among the children of IAS fathers, it was a rat race. For some of the IAS dads, simply passing the grueling entrance test meant they were set for life. It was the last test they would ever have to take. But my father believed passing the IAS exam was merely the entry point to being able to take even more important exams. He was a quintessential lifelong learner. But unlike most of my peers at that time, whose high-achieving parents applied tremendous pressure to achieve, I didn’t face any of that. My mom was just the opposite of a tiger mom. She never pressured me to do anything other than just be happy.
That suited me just fine. As a kid, I couldn’t have cared less about pretty much anything, except for the sport of cricket. One time, my father hung a poster of Karl Marx in my bedroom; in response, my mother hung one of Lakshmi, the Indian goddess of plentitude and contentment. Their contrasting messages were clear: My father wanted intellectual ambition for me, while my mother wanted me to be happy versus being captive to any dogma. My reaction? The only poster I really wanted was one of my cricketing hero, the Hyderabadi great, M. L. Jaisimha, famous for his boyish good looks and graceful style, on and off the field.

Like many others, it was my great fortune to benefit from the convergence of several tectonic movements: India’s independence from British rule, the American civil rights movement, which changed immigration policy in the United States, and the global tech boom. Indian independence led to large investments in education for Indian citizens like me. In the United States, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act abolished the nation-of-origin quota and made it possible for skilled workers to come to America and contribute. Before that, only about a hundred Indians were allowed to immigrate each year. Writing for The New York Times on the fiftieth anniversary of the immigration act, historian Ted Widmer noted that nearly 59 million people came to the United States as a result of the act. But the influx was not unrestrained. The act created preferences for those with technical training and those with family members already in the States. Unknowingly, I was the recipient of this great gift. These movements enabled me to show up in the United States with software skills just before the tech boom of the 1990s. Talk about hitting the lottery.

While my mind was fully engaged, my heart was distracted. Anu and I had decided to marry when I made a trip back to India just before joining Microsoft. I had known Anu all of my life. Her dad and my father had joined the IAS together and we were family friends. In fact, Anu’s dad and I shared a passion for talking endlessly about cricket, something we continue to this day. He had played for his school and college, captaining both teams. When exactly I fell in love with Anu is what computer scientists would call an NP complete question. I can come up with many times and places but there is no one answer. In other words, it’s complex. Our families were close. Our social circles were the same. As kids we had played together. We overlapped in school and college. Our beloved family dog came from Anu’s family dog’s litter. But once I moved to the United States, I lost touch with her. When I went back to India for a visit, we saw each other again. She was in her final year of architecture at Manipal and enjoying an internship in New Delhi. Our two families met for dinner one evening, and that night, more than ever, I was convinced that she was the one. We shared the same values, the same outlook on the world, and dreamed of similar futures. In many ways, her family was already mine and mine hers. The next day, I persuaded her to take me to an optician where I needed to have my glasses repaired. After the appointment, we walked and talked for hours in the neighboring Lodi Gardens, an ancient architectural site that today is popular with tourists. Anu, a student of architecture, loved all the historical monuments that dotted Delhi, and for days afterward we explored them together. I had visited them all before as a kid. But this was different. We stopped for lunch on Pandara Road, enjoyed plays in the National Institute of Drama, and shopped in the bookstores of Khan Market. We had fallen in love. It was in the lush Lodi Gardens that one October afternoon in 1992 I proposed and, thankfully for me, Anu said yes. We walked back to Anu’s place on Humayun Road and broke the news to Anu’s mom. We were married just two months later, in December. It was a happy time, but the complications of immigration would soon prove a challenge.

Anu was in the last year of her architecture degree and the plan was for her to complete the remaining course and join me in Redmond. In the summer of 1993, Anu applied for a visa to join me during her final vacation before finishing school. But her visa application was rejected because she was married to a permanent resident. Anu’s father sought an appointment with the U.S. consul general in New Delhi and argued with him that the U.S. visa rules were not consistent with the family values that the United States stood for. The combination of his persuasiveness and the kindness of the U.S. consul general led to Anu getting a short-term tourist visa—a rare exception. After her vacation, she returned to India and college to complete her degree. It was now clear to us that Anu’s return to the United States would be very difficult given the visa waitlist for spouses of permanent residents. Microsoft had an immigration lawyer who told me it would take five or more years to get Anu into the country under existing rules. I contemplated quitting Microsoft and returning to India. But our lawyer, Ira Rubinstein, said something interesting. “Hey, maybe you should give up your green card and go back to an H1B.” He was suggesting that I give up permanent residency and instead reapply for temporary professional worker status. If you’ve seen the Gerard Depardieu film Green Card, you know the comedic lengths people will go to to obtain permanent residency in the United States. So why would I give up the coveted green card for temporary status? Well, the H1B enables spouses to come to the United States while their husbands and wives are working here. Such is the perverse logic of this immigration law. There was nothing I could do about it. Anu was my priority. And that made my decision a simple one. I went back to the U.S. embassy in Delhi in June of 1994, past the enormous lines of people hoping to get a visa, and told a clerk that I wanted to give back my green card and apply for an H1B. He was dumbfounded. “Why?” he asked. I said something about the crazy immigration policy, he shook his head and pushed a new form to me. “Fill this out.” The next morning, I returned to apply for an H1B application. Miraculously, it all worked. Anu joined me (for good) in Seattle, where we would start a family and build a life together. What I didn’t expect was the instant notoriety around campus. “Hey, there goes the guy who gave up his green card.” Every other day someone would call me and ask for advice. Much later, one of my colleagues, Kunal Bahl, did quit Microsoft when his H1B ran out and his green card had not yet arrived. He returned to India and then founded Snapdeal, which today is worth more than $1 billion and employs five thousand people. Ironically, online, cloud-based companies like Snapdeal would play an important role in my future and that of Microsoft. And the lessons I learned in my former country continue to shape my present.

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.

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.

Steve Jobs understood what the soul of a company is. He once said that “design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” I agree. Apple will always remain true to its soul as long as its inner voice, its motivation, is about great design for consumer products. The soul of our company is different. I knew that Microsoft needed to regain its soul as the company that makes powerful technology accessible to everyone and every organization—democratizing technology. When I first wore HoloLens, Microsoft’s holographic computer, I thought about how it might be used by large enterprises for design and in schools and hospitals, not just how much fun playing Minecraft will be.

Early in my new role, Bill Gates and I walked together from one building to the next to meet with a reporter from Vanity Fair. Bill had decided to remain on the board, but would step down as chairman. The foundation he’d cofounded with his wife, Melinda, would now be his primary focus, but he remained passionate about software and about Microsoft. On our walk, he enthusiastically talked about a new product that would blur the lines between a document and a website. We brainstormed how to develop an architecture that would enable rich capabilities for composing a report, but instead of a static page it would have all the richness of an interactive website. We quickly got into the weeds, volleying ideas back and forth about visualization data structures and storage systems. At one point Bill looked at me, smiled, and said it was good to be talking software engineering.

Over the first several months of my tenure, I devoted a lot of time to listening, to anyone and everyone just as I had promised to do in that Thanksgiving memo to the board. I met with all of our leaders and made a point of going out as I always had to meet with partners and customers. As I listened, there were two questions I was still trying to answer. The first, why are we here? Answering this question would be central to defining the company for years to come. The second question was, what do we do next? There is that great closing scene in The Candidate when Robert Redford, having finally won the election, pulls his advisor into a room and asks, “What do we do now?” For starters, I decided to listen.
Straightaway I heard from hundreds of employees at every level and in every part of the company. We held focus groups to allow people to share their opinions anonymously as well. Listening was the most important thing I accomplished each day because it would build the foundation of my leadership for years to come. To my first question, why does Microsoft exist, the message was loud and clear. We exist to build products that empower others. That is the meaning we’re all looking to infuse into our work. I heard other things as well. Employees wanted a CEO who would make crucial changes, but one who also respected the original ideals of Microsoft, which had always been to change the world. They wanted a clear, tangible and inspiring vision. They wanted to hear more frequently about progress in transparent and simple ways. Engineers wanted to lead again, not follow. They wanted to up the coolness. We had technology the press would fawn over in Silicon Valley, such as leading-edge artificial intelligence, but we weren’t showing it off. What they really demanded was a road map to remove paralysis. For example, Google made headlines with glitzy demonstrations of their artificial intelligence experiments while we had world-class speech and vision recognition and advanced machine learning that we kept under wraps. The real challenge I was contemplating, though, was how do we take our technologies and do things that speak to our identity and add unique value for our customers?
On my second question, where do we go from here, I became convinced that the new CEO of Microsoft needed to do several things very well right away, during the first year.

• Communicate clearly and regularly our sense of mission, worldview, and business and innovation ambitions.
• Drive cultural change from top to bottom, and get the right team in the right place.
• Build new and surprising partnerships in which we can grow the pie and delight customers.
• Be ready to catch the next wave of innovation and platform shifts. Reframe our opportunity for a mobile- and cloud-first world, and drive our execution with urgency.
• Stand for timeless values, and restore productivity and economic growth for everyone.

This list does not suggest a formula for success since even today Microsoft is still very much in the midst of change. We will not know the lasting impact of our approach for some time.

So what did this growth mindset reveal? One of the lessons we took back is that it’s too simplistic to call a country like Kenya a developing economy or the United States a developed one. Both countries have educated, tech-savvy customers capable of using our most sophisticated products, and both countries have potential customers with little or no skills. Sure, there are higher concentrations of one or the other in each country, but it’s a false distinction simply to think of countries as either developed or developing. The Windows 10 launch in Kenya struck a far more global tone for the company, and it also taught us valuable lessons.
I like to think that the C in CEO stands for culture. The CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture. As I had told employees in Orlando, anything is possible for a company when its culture is about listening, learning, and harnessing individual passions and talents to the company’s mission. Creating that kind of culture is my chief job as CEO. And so, whether it was through public events like the launch of Windows 10 or through speeches, emails, tweets, internal posts, or monthly employee Q&A sessions, I planned to use every opportunity at my disposal to encourage our team to live this culture of dynamic learning.

Asimov was not alone in contemplating the risks. Elon Musk, the inventor and entrepreneur, went so far as to say that if humans don’t add a digital layer of intelligence to their brains—high bandwidth between your cortex and your computer AI—we may all become little more than house cats. And computer pioneer Alan Kay quips, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” In the AI context, he’s basically saying, Stop predicting what the future will be like; instead, create it in a principled way. I agree. As with any software design challenge, that principled approach begins with the platform being built upon. In software development terms, AI is becoming a third run time—the next system on top of which programmers will build and execute applications. The PC was the first run time for which Microsoft developed applications like the Office suite of tools—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the rest. Today the Web is the second run time. In an AI and robotics world, productivity and communication tools will be written for an entirely new platform, one that doesn’t just manage information but also learns from information and interacts with the physical world.

How can we protect ourselves and our society from the adverse effects of information platforms—increasingly built on AI—that prioritize engagement and ad dollars over the valuable education that comes with encountering social diversity of facts, opinion, and context? This is a driving question that needs much more work.
But there are “musts” for humans, too—particularly when it comes to thinking clearly about the skills future generations must prioritize and cultivate. To stay relevant, our kids and their kids will need:

• EMPATHY—Empathy, which is so difficult to replicate in machines, will be invaluable in the human-AI world. The ability to perceive others’ thoughts and feelings, to collaborate and build relationships will be critical. If we hope to harness technology to serve human needs, we humans must lead the way by developing a deeper understanding and respect for one another’s values, cultures, emotions, and drives.
• EDUCATION—Some argue that because life spans will increase, birth rates will decline, and thus spending on education will decline as well. But I believe that to create and manage innovations we cannot fathom today, we will need increased investment in education to attain higher level thinking and more equitable education outcomes. Developing the knowledge and skills needed to implement new technologies on a large scale is a difficult social problem that will take a long time to resolve. The power loom was invented in 1810 but took thirty-five years to transform the clothing industry because of shortages of trained mechanics.
• CREATIVITY—One of the most coveted human skills is creativity, and this won’t change. Machines will enrich and augment our creativity, but the human drive to create will remain central. In an interview, novelist Jhumpa Lahiri was asked why an author with such a special voice in English chose to create a new literary voice in Italian, her third language. “Isn’t that the point of creativity, to keep searching?”
• JUDGMENT AND ACCOUNTABILITY—We may be willing to accept a computer-generated diagnosis or legal decision, but we will still expect a human to be ultimately accountable for the outcomes.

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