Comment by burnte

Some of that is extremely bad advice and explains why MS is in the pickle it’s in.

“Don’t come whining that you don’t have the resources you need. We’ve done our homework. We’ve evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities and allocated our available resources to those opportunities. That is what you have to work with.”

Right out of the gate they’re telling you that your judgment is irrelevant to the scope of the problem. Immediately the chances of success are reduced quite a bit because the SME is not trusted to help craft the terms of engagement. If you aren’t at the table to help draft the terms of engagement, to help define the scope and to help define the resources needed, you’re always going to be working from someone else’s plan. Success is defined by not by your ability to execute, but someone else’s ability to plan. They’re telling you that you may be the SME, but they’re the ones who will be making the judgement calls. Politics has risen above engineering and above business strategy.

“You only have 2 controls: 1) The clarity, culture, and energy you give your teams ; and 2) Resource allocation .”

Except we’ve determined you don’t get much of a say in resource allocation, they’ve allocated the resources you get. If you determine the way to win with the plan you were given is to change that, you have to convince other people why their planning was wrong, and that’s rarely easy.

And you, as a leader, have far more than “clarity, culture, and energy”, too.

This shows that some of the major flaws that drove me out of a cushy role in MS in 2004 are still there today. I think Nadella is a better leader than Ballmer in knowing how to respond to markets, but this speech explains to me with crystal clarity why the AI push has gone so poorly. They think they can still dictate the terms of engagement with the market.