Greg McKeown:
Welcome back, everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am with you on this journey to learn to understand as fast as possible, as deeply as possible, so that we can make our highest contribution with our one wild and precious life.
Have you ever wanted to make sure that technology would be something that you mastered rather than it mastering you? Today I’ve invited Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, to come and share his perspectives on how to make technology a tool, not a weapon, and how to make sure it’s working for you, not against you. By the end of today’s episode, you will learn the one single strength that Brad observed in all three CEOs of Microsoft that he’s worked for, the Bill Gates years, the Balmer years, and now with Satya. He sees a certain strength in all of them that’s relevant for your success in every area of your life. As well as how to make sure that AI and all these new technologies can work for you, not against you. Let’s get to it.
Subscribe to the podcast so that you can make it effortless to receive new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.
You mentioned having been at Microsoft for 30 years. You’ve seen a lot of both technology changes, of course, in that time, but also CEO changes in that time. You’ve had a really unique perspective between, let’s call it, the three eras, technology leaders, Bill Gates, Balmer, and now, of course, Satya Nadella. Can you describe the differences for those on the outside?
Brad Smith:
First of all, I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have worked closely for and with these three extraordinary leaders. That’s the way I think about them. The first thing I would note is they all share something in common, something I’ve seen as a very common attribute in other very, very successful leaders in their field around the world. It’s curiosity. They’ve always, each of them been very interested in learning more and thinking more deeply and broadly about whatever it was that was important.
Now then you get to the differences, you know, they reflect different ages, different ages of technology and the like. But you know, Bill Gates, as sort of the world knows, is an extraordinarily avid reader. Bill can consume the written word and not just memorize it but digest its import almost perhaps more deeply than anyone I’ve ever met. I still remember being with him in different settings when he would suddenly recite, you know, a footnote of a legal decision by number footnote 12. That was an important footnote, and he would tell me what it said, and I would be scratching my head. What footnote was that?
Steve Balmer can consume numbers in a way that I’ve never seen anyone else achieve. He could take, he can take a spreadsheet, and he can find the stories that the numbers tell, the insights about business performance, or just about anything that can be put into quantitative form.
Satya is a bit of a modern-day Renaissance individual who is extraordinarily broad in his reading, but he can also write poetry. I remember early in his tenure as CEO of Microsoft, we were visiting the president of Finland, and we were a few minutes away from his residence, and it was clear we were gonna get there early, so we were all in the back of a van. We thought, well, we better pull over and stop for five minutes before we get there early. And we had the government affairs leader for Microsoft from Finland, and in those five minutes, Satya just casually turned to him and said, who’s the most famous poet in the history of Finland? Oh, and what did he write about? And who’s the most famous literary author? And what do the people in Finland think about China and what’s happening with residential real estate prices in Helsinki, and what does that mean about the economy?
And it just went on and on. And I sat there thinking to myself as I watched our government affairs person quite adeptly answer all these questions. Wow. If I were asked each of these questions about the United States or Seattle, I’m not sure I would have all of them at the tip of my tongue. But just the range of that curiosity, that is an extraordinary talent. It is a strength. And I think for any person who really wants to contemplate what it will take to be successful in their life and have a rewarding life, nurture curiosity, I think that is just a fundamental lesson that I’ve drawn from working with these individuals.
Greg McKeown:
How did that curiosity show up in meetings with you, with the executive team? Did it show up in what ways?
Brad Smith:
Curiosity best shows up when people are asking questions and listening to answers. It goes to a little bit why I like Bing or ChatGPT, you ask it more questions. Anytime you can ask anyone or anything more questions, you can pursue your curiosity in a much more robust way and use it to take your curiosity to some degree where it leads you. You have to listen to the answers as well. Otherwise, it’s sort of a one-sided conversation that’s not very enlightening.
And over time, cultural norms have evolved. Microsoft, in the 1990s, when I joined, questions would sort of take the form of arguments. Somebody would say something, somebody else would say, well, that’s wrong. And then the first person would explain, well, it was why it was right. And if you really understood what was happening, you could appreciate that this was like seeing a lively family argue with their loved ones. But if you didn’t enjoy that kind of environment, it was not nearly as inclusive or as welcoming as I think we quite rightly seek to advance today.
The first week that Satya became CEO in 2014, he brought a book to the Friday meeting of our senior leadership team. And, like a lot of books, the title tells the story. It was called The Art of Nonviolent Communications, how to Draw People in by asking them more questions, by putting them at ease, by meeting them where they are, and really listening. And you know, every day I try to think about where we’ve come from and where we are today, and you know, every day. I think it’s a little bit of a challenge when you are trying to get so much done. When you’re working in a high-stress environment, you’ll have to not just remind yourself but kick yourself to try to be your best self. And you have to accept, at least I do when I get in my car to go home at night, that I probably had several moments during the day when I fell short of what I would’ve aspired to be. But the more one can aim for a high bar, I think the better off one is.
Greg McKeown:
There’s a relationship really between how busy we are and the quality of the communication we have with other people. This moment about Satya bringing Nonviolent Communication, I know this book well, and it’s part of the research that I’m doing right now about the challenges of people understanding each other, especially in a fast-paced environment. Have you seen it change the way that the team makes decisions and wrestles with issues? Has it translated?
Brad Smith:
It certainly has. At Microsoft, I think we’re a different company culturally. Yeah. Then we were a decade or two before. It doesn’t mean that everyone always gets it right. But it’s really important to set a norm, a standard that encourages people to interact with each other in a certain way. And this one does. I mean, and you know, I, the title does say it all. I mean, you know, there’s a lot to be said for clear, direct, firm, and gentle communications. And equally, as you put it, and I agree so strongly, the biggest challenge often is the shortness of time and the pressure to make decisions quickly and get things done.
Greg McKeown:
Can you capture the contrast? You’re describing an example, like a story of what it looked like at the worst moment. Go back 20 years to an actual encounter you had when you said this is the dark side of this kind of brutal but candid debating way of communicating.
Brad Smith:
Well, there, you know, it was common folklore 20 or 30 or 40 years ago at Microsoft that one would say something, and the response would be, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. Was that true for you? Did you experience that?
Brad Smith:
Oh, sure. It was sort of a badge of honor, and you know, and look, yeah, I always took it as I know that isn’t met, literally, I think once or twice I said, are you sure? I think I said something stupider than this just yesterday, didn’t I? And believe me, that’s what I always found in those years, you could instantly diffuse a tense moment with a sense of humor. And even somebody like Bill Gates who, you know, has been known to utter that phrase, not in his current day, but 20 or 30 years ago. Was the first to laugh at him himself whenever you did that. And so that’s what made it work, at least for me.
Greg McKeown:
It sounds like for those that could interpret what those words really meant.
Brad Smith:
Exactly, it required that kind of interpretation. Maybe it was a little bit like one sees anywhere you need to speak a new language, and if you haven’t yet learned the language, it is jarring. So yeah, that was an issue.
Look, we shouldn’t pretend that every day is a day in Wonderland anywhere. I mean, we all have our bad moments. Everybody’s entitled, in my view, to have a bad day. You’re just not entitled to have a bad day every day. And when we have our good moments, people really dive in and they ask each other questions in a way that I think rightly challenges us each to think more deeply or broadly but does it with the power of questions and conversation rather than a tone or a comment that could appear dismissive and that would, for most people, most of the time, shut them down. That, to me, is what one always needs to try to avoid, and one then needs to step back and, you know, I look at myself and you know, I, it’s not unusual for me to leave a meeting and think, wow, I didn’t handle that particular part of the conversation quite as well as I wish I had.
Greg McKeown:
You are saying, in other words, if we did a 360 on you right now, we might still get some of this feedback saying, oh, Brad, he’s a bit rough. He’s got some of the old Microsoft with him still. Is this what you’re saying?
Brad Smith:
I don’t think you’d find me uttering the phrases that were uttered 20 years ago because I didn’t utter them 20 years ago.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. It wasn’t part of your DNA then.
Brad Smith:
Yeah, but hey, I mean, I’m never gonna claim perfection for sure. If I’m seeing the faults in myself, I’m willing to bet others are too. You know. To me, what it points to, and it’s another lesson that we sort of talk about in our book, but not quite this precise way, but we do in general, one of the fascinating things I find about human nature is that most people, most of the time actually like the way they look in the mirror, but hate the way they look in photographs. Why is that? And I think it captures the reality that we don’t look quite as good to other people as we do to ourselves. So that’s just a long way of saying, yeah, I’m, I’m guessing you can find some folks around here that would be very good at critiquing my shortcomings because I’m certainly capable of doing it myself, so they must see it even better than me.
Greg McKeown:
But this is an interesting subject matter to be on an unintended one, but an interesting one because I was just reading a fascinating analysis of learning. The article was making the case that our most sophisticated learning, the most impressive learning we do, happens before we’ve entered any formal education because we have learned movement, you know, and anyone who’s had a stroke understands. That’s like extremely challenging to get back. And the same for language. We have gone from not only nonverbal language to verbal language.
These are massive changes in our capacity and the words we use, those are tools and weapons too. And one could argue they’re the most advanced of all the technologies, even though we would never think of them in these ways. We think only of the latest technology in AI, of course, is a theme golden thread through our conversation today. But somehow, this taken-for-granted ability still, even here at Microsoft, cutting-edge technologies still represents a massive challenge and opportunity. Does that seem fair?
Brad Smith:
I think it’s not only fair, it helps to some degree pulling the threads of this conversation together. Because fundamentally what we’re talking about is the role of language, and one of the things that Satya Nadella has commented on is he thinks of language as an invention to help people understand the world, first of all. So we use language so we can explain the world to ourselves and to each other, and we can pass it down in written form to those who come after us. And in that sense, as Satya has pointed out, a software engineer might most naturally think language is a sort of software for the brain. The brain is the hardware, and language is the software. And then you think about AI, you know what we’re really talking about in 2023 is it’s called a large language model.
Greg McKeown:
Yes.
Brad Smith:
It is a model that is trained based on all of the languages and all of the linguistic material, the words of the world. And so, if language was invented to help us understand the world, it actually makes common sense that a large language model fueling artificial intelligence would create a new form of computing that can help humanity understand the world even better. That is what we are working with. That’s the magic. Even though it’s not magic, it’s really just math that is the potential harm. Because as you then take us back to thinking about words that can be used to help. Words can be used to hurt language. A large language model does that at a greater scale, perhaps than ever.
Greg McKeown:
The Tower of Babel example, I often thought about that story as being, well, it has to be a literal separation of languages. This somehow, this spontaneous mythological shift that overnight everyone is speaking literally a different language, but it is totally unnecessary that people are speaking a new language.
We can lose the ability to understand each other while we’re still speaking the same language. You can speak to someone who speaks a different language to you, and if your intent is to understand each other, you can work through the differences and barriers of communication. And so clearly, there is another form of language, let’s call it the language of understanding, that precedes spoken language, is more important than spoken language, can be infiltrated negatively if somebody’s contentious with each other. Suddenly all of that ability to understand each other is shot and disappears, gone, and it seems like AI is now firmly in that space, and so it can be used to accelerate massively our understanding of the world and then potentially, therefore, each other.
But also, where there are errors in it that aren’t obvious to people can help us misunderstand each other and the world in ways that we do not yet know how they’ll be. Think War of the Worlds on the radio, where everyone thinks it’s literal. Like, I think we’re in that kind of inflection. It’s affecting the way we actually communicate and understand ourselves in the world around it is a tool and surely can also be a weapon.
Brad Smith:
I think, in short, it is our role, and it is our responsibility as a tech company to do everything we can to advance the good things that it can do. And equally, to have our eyes wide open about what can go wrong and to create guardrails to keep that from happening, we need to think of both sides of this coin at the same time and pursue this with utter determination.
Greg McKeown:
Love that period and exclamation mark. I think the same for everyone listening to this. It’s the same responsibility each of us have individually to do the same thing. And yet nevertheless, you do, Brad, and those who work with have a disproportionate responsibility because these technologies are so massive now. I think they are, in many cases, greater than just the individual’s ability to manage that level. Thank you for being on the podcast and being with me today. Thank you.
Brad Smith:
Thank you.
Greg McKeown:
Well, there we have it. The end of part two of this interview with Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft. What was your insight? What is one thing that you can do differently as a result of listening to this conversation?
For me, it’s going to be being curious with every person I meet today and who is one person that you can share this with so that you can continue the conversation after the conversation has passed. I’m going to post this on social media. So that’s my commitment here. Well, thank you. Really, thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
