Satya Nadella Quotes on Culture, Innovation, and Leadership

“The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.” — Satya Nadella

This is my hand-crafted collection of Satya Nadella quotes on culture, innovation, leadership and more.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is famous for leading Microsoft’s digital transformation and helping Microsoft rediscover its soul.

Satya is also high respected for his leadership skill and his ability to create clarity, generate energy and drive results through vision, diversity & inclusion, and empowerment.

What a lot of leaders like to learn from Satya is how to change a culture, how to survive and thrive digital transformation, and how to become an innovative company that is customer obsessed and embraces continuous learning and growth.

Satya’s Quotes Teach Us His Mental Model and Approach

I find that leaders leave a lot of clues through their language, and quotes are a great way to learn a lot about somebody’s mental model and approach.

I’ve taken the time to organize my Satya Nadella quotes into meaningful categories so that you can learn from Satya’s word of wisdom.

Here is the word cloud that formed in my mind as I organized Satya Nadella’s quotes in to meaningful categories:

continuous learning | culture | customer obsession | empathy | empowerment | compassion | diversity, equity, and inclusion | innovation | meaningful work | meaningful life | mindfulness | long-term strategy | listening to your customers and employees | longevity | renewal | hit refresh

You never know when you might catch yourself asking, “What would Satya do?”, and if you have a handy quote, it might help guide you.

I find that if you familiarize yourself with these Satya Nadella quotes, you will have great insights and wisdom about how to create your future and how to be a better technology leader.

I believe you will also find some great guidance on how to think about, approach, and organize innovation.

Minimally, I believe by learning Satya’s quotes you will take a better, more informed approach to your digital transformation from one of the most successful digital leaders on the planet.

Enjoy.

Satya Nadella Quotes on Competition

“But envy is negative and outer-directed, not driven from within, and so I knew that it wouldn’t carry us very far down the path to true renewal.”

— Satya Nadella

“Compete vigorously and with passion in the face of uncertainty and intimidation.”

— Satya Nadella

“Competition is not going to kill us.”

— Satya Nadella

“I don’t want to fight old battles. I want to fight new ones.”

— Satya Nadella

“It showed me that you must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe.”

— Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella Quotes on Continuous Learning

“Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don’t learn.”

— Satya Nadella

“In our business, things look like a failure until they’re not. It’s pretty binary transitions.”

— Satya Nadella

“It’s not about the failure, it’s about learning from the failures. Failure itself cannot be celebrated.”

— Satya Nadella

“Learning to fly is not pretty but flying is.”

— Satya Nadella

“Like anyone else, a lot of what I do and how I think has been shaped by my family and my overall life experience. Many who know me say I am also defined by my curiosity and thirst for learning. I buy more books than I can finish. I sign up for more online courses than I can complete.”

— Satya Nadella

“Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place.”

— Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella Quotes on Culture

“After all, our products may come and go, but our values are timeless.”

— Satya Nadella

“But as management guru Peter Drucker once said, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’”

— Satya Nadella

“Consistency over time is trust.”

— Satya Nadella

“Culture change means we will do things differently.”

— Satya Nadella

“Finally, trust is the foundation upon which everything we do is built. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in security and compliance that set the standard for enterprises.”

— Satya Nadella

“If we can connect what we stand for as individuals with what this company is capable of, there is very little we can’t accomplish.”

— Satya Nadella

“If you are going to have a risk-taking culture, you can’t really look at every failure as a failure, you’ve got to be able to look at the failure as a learning opportunity.”

— Satya Nadella

“Many companies aspire to change the world. But very few have all the elements required: talent, resources, and perseverance. Microsoft has proven that it has all three in abundance.”

— Satya Nadella

“One thing I had learned from my dad’s experience as a senior Indian government official was that few tasks are more difficult than building a lasting institution. The choice of leading through consensus versus fiat is a false one. Any institution-building comes from having a clear vision and culture that works to motivate progress both top-down and bottom-up.”

— Satya Nadella

“Our ambitions are bold and so must be our desire to change and evolve our culture.”

— Satya Nadella

“Sure, in this age of continuous updates and always-on technologies, hitting refresh may sound quaint, but still when it’s done right, when people and cultures re-create and refresh, a renaissance can be the result.”

— Satya Nadella

“The key to the culture change was individual empowerment.”

— Satya Nadella

“The more you live it, the more sustainable your business approach becomes.”

— Satya Nadella

“This culture needs to be a microcosm of the world we hope to create outside the company. One where builders, makers, and creators achieve great things. But, equally important, one where every individual can be their best self, where diversity of skin color, gender, religion, and sexual orientation is understood and celebrated.”

— Satya Nadella

“We needed to build deeper empathy for our customers and their unarticulated and unmet needs. It was time to hit refresh.”

— Satya Nadella

“We needed to convert Nietzsche’s courage in the face of reality, into courage in the face of opportunity.”

— Satya Nadella

“We want to empower people.”

— Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella Quotes on Digital Transformation

“After all, how we experience the world is through communications and collaboration. If we are interested in machines that work with us, then we can’t ignore the humanistic approach.”

— Satya Nadella

“Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that ‘the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.'”

— Satya Nadella

“Despite all this rapid change in the computing industry, we are still at the beginning of the digital revolution.”

— Satya Nadella

“Everything is going to be connected to cloud and data… All of this will be mediated by software.”

— Satya Nadella

“In the post-Snowden world, you need to enable others to build their own cloud and have mobility of applications. That’s both because of the physicality of computing–where the speed of light still matters–and because of geopolitics.”

— Satya Nadella

“Information technology is at the core of how you do your business and how your business model itself evolves.”

— Satya Nadella

“It’s not about our consumers’ growing dependence in us, but more of us enabling consumers to build their digital independence with us. That to me is the core of our partnership.”

— Satya Nadella

“Microsoft is the productivity and Platform Company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.”

— Satya Nadella

“Over the next 10 years, we’ll reach a point where nearly everything has become digitized.”

— Satya Nadella

“The opportunity ahead for Microsoft is vast, but to seize it, we must focus clearly, move faster, and continue to transform.”

— Satya Nadella

“This is a software-powered world.”

— Satya Nadella

“This notion of universal Windows apps is a very powerful concept because we’re now aggregating the 300-plus-million-socket run rate of Windows into one opportunity for our developers.”

— Satya Nadella

“Trust is more than a handshake. It’s the agreement, the bond, between users of digital services and the suppliers of those services that enables us to enjoy, be productive, learn, explore, express, create, be informed.”

— Satya Nadella

“We live in a world of mobile technology, but it is not the device that is mobile. It is you.”

— Satya Nadella

“We want not just intelligent machines but intelligible machines; not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic intelligence.”

— Satya Nadella

“What was true then and what is true now is that we create technology so others can create more technology.”

— Satya Nadella

“You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.”

— Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella Quotes on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

“I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work.”

— Satya Nadella

“If you could understand impermanence deeply, you would develop more equanimity. You would not get too excited about either the ups or downs of life. And only then would you be ready to develop that deeper sense of empathy and compassion for everything around you.”

— Satya Nadella

“If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.”

— Satya Nadella

“Part of my response is to urge policymakers to broaden their thinking about the role of technology in economic development. Too often they focus on trying to attract Silicon Valley companies in hopes they will open offices locally. They want Silicon Valley satellites. Instead, they should be working on plans to make the best technologies available to local entrepreneurs so that they can organically grow more jobs at home—not just in high-tech industries but in every economic sector.”

— Satya Nadella

“Throughout history, technological advances have consistently made the majority of workers richer, not poorer.”

— Satya Nadella

“The next time you are in a meeting, ask the quietest person what they think. Invite everyone into the conversation. If you are on a conference call, ask the people on the phone to share their thoughts first.”

— Satya Nadella

“We must ensure not only that everyone receives equal pay for equal work, but that they have the opportunity to do equal work.”

— Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella Quotes on Empathy

“Empathy ground me and centers me.”

— Satya Nadella

“Empathy makes you a better innovator.”

— Satya Nadella

“Humans will add value where machines cannot. As we encounter more and more artificial intelligence, real intelligence, real empathy, and real common sense will be scarce. The new jobs will be predicated on know how to work with machines, but also on these uniquely human attributes.”

— Satya Nadella

“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.”

— Satya Nadella

“In addition to confidence, a CEO must have empathy.”

— Satya Nadella

“Innovation is empathy turned into action.”

— Satya Nadella

“My passion is to put empathy at the center of everything I pursue–from the products we launch, to the new markets we enter, to the employees, customers, and partners we work with.”

— Satya Nadella

“My personal philosophy and my passion, developed over time and through exposure to many different experiences, is to connect new ideas with a growing sense of empathy for other people.”

— Satya Nadella

“Our core business is connected with the customers’ needs and we will not be able to satisfy them if we won’t have a deep sense of empathy.”

— Satya Nadella

“The key to everything is empathy, because nothing is more fruitful than walking in the shoes of others.”

— Satya Nadella

“We needed to build deeper empathy for our customers and their unarticulated and unmet needs. It was time to hit refresh.”

— Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella Quotes on Innovation

“∑ (Education + Innovation) x Intensity of Tech Use = Economic Growth”

— Satya Nadella

“Alan Kay quips, ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.'”

— Satya Nadella

“I did not get why the world needed the third ecosystem in phones, unless we changed the rules.”

— Satya Nadella

“If you don’t have a real stake in the new, then just surviving on the old – even if it is about efficiency – I don’t think is a long-term game.”

— Satya Nadella

“If you don’t jump on the new, you don’t survive.”

— Satya Nadella

“Innovation was being replaced by bureaucracy. Teamwork was being replaced by internal politics. We were falling behind.”

— Satya Nadella

“It’s not about going where people tell you to, but how you get there before there is conventional wisdom.”

— Satya Nadella

“Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future.”

— Satya Nadella

“Most people have a very strong sense of organizational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation.”

— Satya Nadella

“One of the key things in the tech business, in particular, is that you need to be able to push boundaries.”

— Satya Nadella

“Our industry does not respect tradition. It only respects innovation.”

— Satya Nadella

“The source of innovation comes from having a deep sense of empathy.”

— Satya Nadella

“Think about the integration between teams and the creative cloud or the marketing and experience cloud, for example, these are all the things that take the friction out and enable people to communicate so that the end product is much better.”

— Satya Nadella

“We must respond to opportunities before they become conventional wisdom.”

— Satya Nadella

“We’re not in hardware for hardware’s sake. We’re in hardware to be able to express all our platform and productivity software in a way that’s unique.”

— Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella Quotes on Leadership

“A leader must see the external opportunities and the internal capability and culture – and all of the connections among them – and respond to them before they become obvious parts of the conventional wisdom.”

— Satya Nadella

“Every person, organization, and even society reaches a point at which they owe it to themselves to hit refresh—to reenergize, renew, reframe, and rethink their purpose.”

— Satya Nadella

“I knew that to lead effectively I needed to get some things square in my own mind—and, ultimately, in the minds of everyone who works at Microsoft. Why does Microsoft exist? And why do I exist in this new role? These are questions everyone in every organization should ask themselves. I worried that failing to ask these questions, and truly answer them, risked perpetuating earlier mistakes and, worse, not being honest.”

— Satya Nadella

“I think playing cricket taught me more about working in teams and leadership that has stayed with me throughout my career.”

— Satya Nadella

“Leadership means making choices and then rallying the team around those choices.”

— Satya Nadella

“Listen to your customers and your employees, they are the most important thing and define your business.”

— Satya Nadella

“Listening was the most important thing I accomplished each day because it would build the foundation of leadership for years to come.”

— Satya Nadella

“My approach is to lead with a sense of purpose and pride in what we do, not envy or combativeness.”

— Satya Nadella

“Technologies will come and go, so you need to be able to both ask and answer the question: What do you do as a company, why do you exist?”

— Satya Nadella

“The bigger a company, the more responsibility its leader has to think about the world, its citizens and their long term opportunities.”

— Satya Nadella

“The energy you create around you is perhaps going to be the most important attribute – in the long run, EQ trumps IQ. Without being a source of energy for others, very little can be accomplished.”

— Satya Nadella

“The number one thing that you have to do as a leader: to bolster the confidence of the people you lead.”

— Satya Nadella

“The questions required a lot of soul-searching. What is my vision? What is the strategy to achieve it? What does success look like and where to get started? Now, a few months later, I reflected on what I had written and the process that led to this day.”

— Satya Nadella

“There is something only a CEO uniquely can do, which is set that tone, which can then capture the soul of the collective.”

— Satya Nadella

“What I remembered was the lesson that went unheeded: the urgent need to build shared context, trust, and credibility with your team.”

— Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella Quotes on Life

“Believe me, my journey has not been a simple journey of progress. There have been many ups and downs, and it is the choices that I made at each of those times that have helped shape what I have achieved.”

— Satya Nadella

“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.”

— Satya Nadella

“So long as you enjoy it, do it mindfully and well, and have an honest purpose behind it, life won’t fail you.”

— Satya Nadella

“The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.”

— Satya Nadella

“The way I measure my life is – Am I better than I was last year?”

— Satya Nadella

“The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.”

— Satya Nadella

“You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you’re successful, sometimes your not, but it’s the average that counts.”

— Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella Quotes on Work

“Finally, I truly believe that each of us must find meaning in our work. The best work happens when you know that it’s not just work, but something that will improve other people’s lives.”

— Satya Nadella

“I marvel every day at how people can excel – and that’s what really gets me going.”

— Satya Nadella

“I must work hard – not to climb the ladder, but to do important work.”

— Satya Nadella

“I told them that we spend far too much time at work for it not to have deep meaning.”

— Satya Nadella

“I’m also grounded in our challenges, in fact, that’s the adventure which creates the competitive zeal in me to do great work.”

— Satya Nadella

“Instead of thinking of you working for Microsoft, think of how Microsoft can work for you.”

— Satya Nadella

“Passion, toil, and training can help you to soar.”

— Satya Nadella

“The question is: How are you able to organize your information, your tasks, and get stuff done spanning those different roles? Nobody lives in isolation.”

— Satya Nadella

“When I think about my career, my successes are built on learning from failures.”

— Satya Nadella

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Image credit – By Brian Smale and Microsoft – Satya Nadella Microsoft leadership profile page, CC BY-SA 4.0