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In 286 of Anecdotally Speaking, learn a remarkable story of leadership, humility and what it means to truly put the organisation first.

In this episode of Anecdotally Speaking, Shawn shares a story he discovered while listening to the Acquired podcast about Microsoft’s leadership journey. The story centres on Satya Nadella during his time leading Microsoft’s search engine division, Bing, when the company was trying to strengthen its position in the search market.

What unfolds during a meeting to recruit a highly regarded search expert becomes a moment that reveals something important about Nadella’s leadership style. Mark and Shawn explore what this moment says about leadership behaviour and how seemingly small decisions can shape the way teams and organisations operate.

Find the full story in the Acquired podcast: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-steve-ballmer-interview

Explore upcoming events here: https://www.anecdote.com/events

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Tags: Leadership, Teamwork, Culture, Storytelling, Integrity, Values in Action

This story starts at 2:26

Back in the mid-2000s, Microsoft was trying to strengthen its position in the search engine market with Bing. At the time, Satya Nadella was leading the division.

One of Nadella’s colleagues kept telling him about a brilliant search engineer working at Yahoo in Silicon Valley. His name was Qi Lu, and according to everyone who knew him, he was one of the best minds in search technology.

Eventually, Steve Ballmer, Satya Nadella and another colleague flew down from Seattle to meet him. The meeting went extremely well. They discussed the future of search, the opportunities ahead and how Microsoft could compete in the market.

After the discussion finished, they asked Qi to step out of the room for a moment so the three Microsoft leaders could talk privately about the next step.

As soon as the door closed, Nadella turned to the others and said something surprising.

He said, “We should hire him… and he should be my boss.”

At the time, Nadella was already leading Bing. Yet he believed this new recruit was so good that the best thing for Microsoft would be for him to take the top role, with Nadella reporting to him.

Steve Ballmer later reflected on that moment as a signal of Nadella’s character. Here was a leader willing to step aside from the top job because it was the right decision for the company.

Microsoft did hire Qi Lu, and he became head of Bing. Not long after, Nadella moved on to lead Microsoft’s cloud division, Azure, which went on to become one of the company’s most successful businesses. And eventually, of course, Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft.