I never thought there would be a day where I would get a fan base inside of Microsoft but the last two posts on Microsoft Mesh seem to be flooding my mailbox. Most ask what I mean by leadership and a certain someone actually challenged me to lay down a plan I would implement if I worked there. So what exactly is there to leadership, is it just a personality defect of the loudest idiot in the room saying something out loud and people filing in behind them hoping not to be the next on the headcount chop block? No, allow me to explain.
Leadership is a personal skill that allows you to explain your vision, sell the people on the dream and the benefits that vision delivers, to make everyone involved fulfilled in their task of bringing that vision to life so they give it their all to make it happen.
That is not random pointy haired boss talk, it is a system by which a company is ran. Without leadership, motivation, fulfillment, agenda and vision of what everyone working together could possibly deliver you end up with a workforce that will only do its bare minimum to remain employed and in their spare time work on fun and cool projects that are only sustained until they are fun or until they can move to another area where they can actually be valuable to the company. In the perfect world, every employee would be in their perfect role, making an incredible salary, benefits, looking forward to coming to work each day, enjoying every customer interaction, considering it a personal triumph when each milestone is reached.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. We take jobs to get our foot in the door, we don’t always like the people we work with, we don’t really agree with our bosses or see the point in anything we do. Striking that nerve yet?
To Microsoft’s management:
Microsoft is currently in a position where it has to play catchup in a world saturated with halfassed solutions, finicky customers with no loyalty or ties, that demand an open, free, integrated platform and may from time to time click on an ad. Business calls for tough decisions, gambles and involves risks. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is going to have to give up on that Tween market.
What Microsoft should do, and already does, is represent the grownup version of the web properties. What I’m saying is, fuck the long tail. Forget about the mee-toos. Take the 90% desktop dominance and extend that dominance to the web by following, not buying, Yahoo, Google or whoever happens to be mismanaged bucket of eyeballs at the moment. Make Office collaboration easier without a server. Make remote desktop access easier without buying a server.
Want to be relevant on the Web 2.0, tomorrow? Microsoft Online thing you got?
“Microsoft is proud to be a supporter of small businesses, everywhere. Just getting started with your own business? Microsoft’s got your back, and we’ll give you the tools that the biggest companies in the world run their businesses on - free for the first 5 employees.”
You can’t make money giving things away, but you also can’t go from obscure to dominant overnight. The truth to the above pitch is rooted in the fact that 50-90% of the people that sign up for the above will be out of business within a year. On the oft chance that they grow and scale, they will do so on Microsoft solutions.
Use the Web 2.0 to enhance your desktop experience. You are in the mess you are in because you went the other way around, you flexed your desktop dominance to force to people to play by your rules. Time for another angle.
To Microsoft’s employees:
It is not your fault that your executives would rather float billions of dollars into an external, complex, mess of a transaction for something you could build on your own if you just got some real direction. “We will compete” is not direction, it’s a poor excuse of what to do with the inertia that is behind the Microsoft brand. Sooner or later Steve will have to figure out if he wants Microsoft to be a rising star or if he wants to ride the cash cow into the sunset of enterprise obscurity.
Until Microsoft executives themselves grab the table, get serious about the next wave of products and realize that they can’t be the same thing they have done for the past 10 years or a series of halfassed mee-toos, I recommend staying away from the mee-too divisions.
My advice? Beg, crawl and blow your way into the roles that will fulfill you, make you happy and productive so you don’t turn into a cynic over the direction of the company. If you can do that, you’ll be able to ride the wave of innovation that a lot of us, your partners, are very anxious to see you on.
It’s time for a change. People hate change, it’s the leaders job to sell it. Time to earn yo keep….
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