Hit Refresh: A Memoir by Microsoft’s CEO

I flunked the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) entrance exam, the holy grail of all things academic for middle-class kids growing up in India at that time. My father, who never met an entrance test he did not pass, was more amused than annoyed. But, luckily, I had two other options to pursue engineering. I had gotten into mechanical engineering at Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra and electrical engineering (EE) at Manipal Institute of Technology. I chose Manipal based on a hunch that pursuing EE was going to get me closer to computers and software. And fortuitously the hunch was right. Academically it put me on a pathway that would lead to Silicon Valley and eventually to Microsoft. The friends I made in college were entrepreneurial, driven, and ambitious. I learned from many of them. In fact, years later I rented a house in Sunnyvale, California, with eight of my classmates from Manipal and re-created our dorm-room experience from college. Athletically, though, Manipal left a lot to be desired. Playing cricket was no longer my central passion. I played one match for my college team and hung up my gear. Computers took cricket’s place and became number one in my life. At Manipal I trained in microelectronics—integrated circuits and the first principles of making computers.

I didn’t really have a specific plan for what I’d do after finishing my electrical engineering degree. There is much to be said for my mother’s philosophy of life, which influenced how I thought about my own future and opportunities. She always believed in doing your thing, and at your pace. Pace comes when you do your thing. So long as you enjoy it, do it mindfully and well, and have an honest purpose behind it, life won’t fail you. That has stood me in good stead all my life. After graduation, I had an opportunity to attend a prestigious industrial engineering institute in Bombay. I had also applied to a few colleges in the United States. In those days, the student visa was bit of a crapshoot, and frankly I was hoping it would be rejected. I never wanted to leave India. But as fate would have it, I got my visa and was again faced with some choices—whether to stay in India and do a master’s degree in industrial engineering or go to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee for a master’s degree in electrical engineering. A very dear friend from HPS was attending Wisconsin studying computer science, and so my decision was made. I entered the master’s in computer science program at Wisconsin. And I’m glad I did because it was a small department with professors who were invested in their students. I’m particularly thankful to then department chair Dr. Vairavan and my master’s advisor Professor Hosseini for instilling in me the confidence not to pursue what was easy, but to tackle the biggest and hardest problems in computer science.

If someone had asked me to point to Milwaukee on a map I could not have done it. But on my twenty-first birthday, in 1988, I flew from New Delhi to Chicago O’Hare Airport. From there a friend drove me to campus and dropped me off. What I remember was the quiet. Everything was quiet. Milwaukee was just stunning, pristine. I thought, god, this place is heaven on earth. It was summer. It was beautiful, and my life in the United States was just beginning.

Summer became winter and the cold of Wisconsin is something to behold if you’ve come from southern India. I was a smoker at the time and all smokers had to stand outside. There were a number of us from various parts of the world. The Indian students couldn’t stand the cold so we quit smoking. Then my Chinese friends quit. But the Russians were unaffected by winter’s chill, and they just kept on puffing away.

Sure, I would get homesick, like any kid, but America could not have been more welcoming. I don’t think my story would be possible anywhere else, and I am proud today to call myself an American citizen. Looking back, though, I suppose my story may sound a little programmatic. The son of an Indian civil servant studies hard, gets an engineering degree, immigrates to the United States, and makes it in tech. But it wasn’t that simple. Unlike the stereotype, I was actually not academically that great. I didn’t go to the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) that have become synonymous with building Silicon Valley. Only in America would someone like me get the chance to prove himself rather than be typecast based on the school I attended. I suppose that was true for earlier waves of immigration as well and will be just as true for new generations of immigrants.

Like many others, it was my great fortune to benefit from the convergence of several tectonic movements: India’s independence from British rule, the American civil rights movement, which changed immigration policy in the United States, and the global tech boom. Indian independence led to large investments in education for Indian citizens like me. In the United States, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act abolished the nation-of-origin quota and made it possible for skilled workers to come to America and contribute. Before that, only about a hundred Indians were allowed to immigrate each year. Writing for TheNew York Times on the fiftieth anniversary of the immigration act, historian Ted Widmer noted that nearly 59 million people came to the United States as a result of the act. But the influx was not unrestrained. The act created preferences for those with technical training and those with family members already in the States. Unknowingly, I was the recipient of this great gift. These movements enabled me to show up in the United States with software skills just before the tech boom of the 1990s. Talk about hitting the lottery.

During the first semester at Wisconsin, I took image processing, a computer architecture class, and LISP, one of the oldest computer programming languages. The first set of assignments were just huge programming projects. I’d written a little bit of code but I was not a proficient coder by any stretch. I know the stereotype in America is that the Indians who immigrate are born to code, but we all start somewhere. The assignments were, basically, here it is, go write a bunch of code. It was tough and I had to pick it up quickly. Once I did, it was awesome. I understood pretty early on that the microcomputer was going to shape the world. Initially I thought it might be all about building chips. Most of my college friends all went on to specialize in chip design and work at places with real impact like Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, and Juniper.

I became particularly interested in a theoretical aspect of computer science that was, at its heart, designed to make fast decisions in an atmosphere of great uncertainty and finite time. My focus was a computer science puzzle known as graph coloring. No, I wasn’t coloring graphs with crayons. Graph coloring is part of computational complexity theory in which you must assign labels, traditionally called colors, to elements of a graph within certain constraints. Think of it this way: Imagine coloring the U.S. map so that no state sharing a common border receives the same color. What is the minimal number of colors you would need to accomplish this task? My master’s thesis was about developing the best heuristics to accomplish complex graph coloring in nondeterministic polynomial time, or NP-complete. In other words, how can I solve a problem that has limitless possibilities in a way that is fast and good but not always optimal? Do we solve this as best we can right now, or work forever for the best solution?

Theoretical computer science really grabbed me because it showed the limits to what today’s computers can do. It led me to become fascinated by mathematicians and computer scientists John Von Neumann and Alan Turing, and by quantum computing, which I will write about later as we look ahead to artificial intelligence and machine learning. And, if you think about it, this was great training for a CEO—nimbly managing within constraints.

I completed my master’s in computer science at Wisconsin and even managed to work for what Microsoft would now call an independent software vendor (ISV). I was building apps for Oracle databases while finishing my master’s thesis. I was good at relational algebra and became proficient with databases and structured query language (SQL) programming. This was the era where technology was changing from character or text mode on UNIX workstations to graphical user interfaces like Windows. It was early 1990 and I didn’t even really think about Microsoft at that time because we never used PCs. My focus was on more powerful workstations.

In fact, I left Milwaukee in 1990 for my first job in Silicon Valley at Sun Microsystems. Sun was the king of workstations, a market Microsoft had in its crosshairs. Sun had an amazing collection of talent, including its founders Scott McNealy and Bill Joy, as well as James Gosling, the inventor of Java, and Eric Schmidt, our VP for software development who went on to run Novell and then Google.

My two years at Sun were a time of great transition in the computer business as Sun looked longingly at Microsoft’s Windows graphical user interface, and Microsoft looked longingly at Sun’s beautiful, powerful 32-bit workstations and operating systems. Again, I happened to be at the right place at the right time. Sun asked me to work on desktop software like their email tool. I was later sent to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work for several months with Lotus to port their spreadsheet software to Sun workstations. Then I started to notice something alarming. Every couple of months, Sun wanted to adopt a new graphical user interface (GUI) strategy. That meant I had to rework my programs constantly, and their explanations made less and less sense. I realized that despite its phenomenal leadership and capability, it had a hard time building and sticking with a cogent software strategy.

By 1992, I was again at a crossroads in my life. I wanted to work on software that would change the world. I also wanted to return to graduate school for my MBA. And I missed Anu, whom I intended to marry and bring to the United States. She was finishing her degree in architecture back in Manipal, and we began to plan for her to join me in America.

Like all the times before, there was no master plan, but a call from Redmond, Washington, one afternoon would create a new, unexpected opportunity. It was time to hit refresh again.

* * *

On a cool, November day in the Pacific Northwest, I first set foot on the Microsoft campus and entered an unremarkable corporate office unimaginatively named Building 22. Shrouded by towering Douglas firs, it remains even today barely visible from the adjacent state route 520, known for its floating bridge connecting Seattle to Redmond. The year was 1992. Microsoft’s stock was just beginning an epic rise, though its founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, could still walk down the street unrecognized. Windows 3.1 had just been released, setting the stage for Windows 95 and the grandest consumer technology product launch yet. Sony introduced the CD-ROM, and the first website was launched, though it would be two more years before the Internet would become a tidal wave. TCI introduced digital cable and the FCC approved digital radio. On a chart, PC sales at this time show the start of a meteoric ascent. Looking back now, I couldn’t have timed my entrance any better. The resources, the talent and the vision were there to compete and to lead the industry. My journey to Redmond had taken me from my home in India to Wisconsin for graduate school to the Silicon Valley to work for Sun. Over the summer I had been recruited to join Microsoft as a twenty-five-year-old evangelist for Windows NT, a 32-bit operating system that was designed to extend the company’s popular consumer program into much more powerful business systems. A few years later NT would become the backbone of future Windows versions. Even today’s generation of Windows, Windows 10, builds on the original NT architecture. I had heard of NT while working at Sun but had never used it. A colleague had attended a Microsoft conference where they showed off NT to developers. He came back and told me about the product. I thought, wow, this is going to get serious. I wanted to be in a place that would have real impact. The guys who had recruited me to Microsoft, Richard Tait and Jeff Teper, said they needed someone who understood UNIX and 32-bit operating systems. I was a little unsure. What I really wanted to do was go to business school. I knew that management would complement my engineering training, and I had been thinking about a switch to investment banking. I had gotten into the full-time program at University of Chicago, but Teper said, “You should just join us straightaway.” I decided to do both. I was able to switch my admission to the part-time program at Chicago, but then never told anyone that I was flying to Chicago for weekends. I finished my MBA in two years and was glad I did. During the week my job was to fly all over the country—lugging these enormous Compaq computers—to meet with customers, usually chief information officers at places like Georgia Pacific or Mobil, to convince them that our new, more robust operating system for business was superior to the others and convert them. And at school I learned more math by taking high-level finance classes in Chicago than in my engineering coursework. The classes I took with Steven Kaplan, Marvin Zonis, and many other storied faculty at the university on strategy, finance, and leadership influenced my thinking and intellectual pursuits long after I completed the MBA. It was an exciting time to be at Microsoft. Not long after joining I met Steve Ballmer for the first time. He stopped by my office to give me one of his very expressive high fives for leaving Sun and joining Microsoft. It was the first of what would be many interesting and enjoyable conversations with Steve over the years. There was a true sense of mission and energy at the company then. The sky was the limit.

* * *

Within a few years my work on Windows NT landed me in a new advanced technology group, founded by Renaissance man Nathan Myhrvold. Along with Rick Rashid, Craig Mundie, and others, Microsoft was assembling the greatest technology IQ since Xerox PARC, the famed Silicon Valley center for innovation. I was humbled when asked to join the group as a product manager on a project code-named Tiger Server, which was a major investment in building a video-on-demand (VOD) service. It would be years before cable companies would deliver the technology and business model to support VOD, and years before Netflix made video streaming mainstream. Fortunately, I lived right next to the Microsoft campus, the endpoint for all of this amazing broadband infrastructure that made our VOD pilot possible. So in 1994, long before it was commercially available, I had video-on-demand while sitting in my little apartment. We only had about fifteen movies but I remember watching them over and over again. Even as our team planned to launch our Tiger server over a fully switched asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network to the home, we saw our idea become obsolete virtually overnight with the birth of the Internet.

* * *

While my mind was fully engaged, my heart was distracted. Anu and I had decided to marry when I made a trip back to India just before joining Microsoft. I had known Anu all of my life. Her dad and my father had joined the IAS together and we were family friends. In fact, Anu’s dad and I shared a passion for talking endlessly about cricket, something we continue to this day. He had played for his school and college, captaining both teams. When exactly I fell in love with Anu is what computer scientists would call an NP complete question. I can come up with many times and places but there is no one answer. In other words, it’s complex. Our families were close. Our social circles were the same. As kids we had played together. We overlapped in school and college. Our beloved family dog came from Anu’s family dog’s litter. But once I moved to the United States, I lost touch with her. When I went back to India for a visit, we saw each other again. She was in her final year of architecture at Manipal and enjoying an internship in New Delhi. Our two families met for dinner one evening, and that night, more than ever, I was convinced that she was the one. We shared the same values, the same outlook on the world, and dreamed of similar futures. In many ways, her family was already mine and mine hers. The next day, I persuaded her to take me to an optician where I needed to have my glasses repaired. After the appointment, we walked and talked for hours in the neighboring Lodi Gardens, an ancient architectural site that today is popular with tourists. Anu, a student of architecture, loved all the historical monuments that dotted Delhi, and for days afterward we explored them together. I had visited them all before as a kid. But this was different. We stopped for lunch on Pandara Road, enjoyed plays in the National Institute of Drama, and shopped in the bookstores of Khan Market. We had fallen in love. It was in the lush Lodi Gardens that one October afternoon in 1992 I proposed and, thankfully for me, Anu said yes. We walked back to Anu’s place on Humayun Road and broke the news to Anu’s mom. We were married just two months later, in December. It was a happy time, but the complications of immigration would soon prove a challenge.

* * *

Anu was in the last year of her architecture degree and the plan was for her to complete the remaining course and join me in Redmond. In the summer of 1993, Anu applied for a visa to join me during her final vacation before finishing school. But her visa application was rejected because she was married to a permanent resident. Anu’s father sought an appointment with the U.S. consul general in New Delhi and argued with him that the U.S. visa rules were not consistent with the family values that the United States stood for. The combination of his persuasiveness and the kindness of the U.S. consul general led to Anu getting a short-term tourist visa—a rare exception. After her vacation, she returned to India and college to complete her degree. It was now clear to us that Anu’s return to the United States would be very difficult given the visa waitlist for spouses of permanent residents. Microsoft had an immigration lawyer who told me it would take five or more years to get Anu into the country under existing rules. I contemplated quitting Microsoft and returning to India. But our lawyer, Ira Rubinstein, said something interesting. “Hey, maybe you should give up your green card and go back to an H1B.” He was suggesting that I give up permanent residency and instead reapply for temporary professional worker status. If you’ve seen the Gerard Depardieu film Green Card, you know the comedic lengths people will go to to obtain permanent residency in the United States. So why would I give up the coveted green card for temporary status? Well, the H1B enables spouses to come to the United States while their husbands and wives are working here. Such is the perverse logic of this immigration law. There was nothing I could do about it. Anu was my priority. And that made my decision a simple one. I went back to the U.S. embassy in Delhi in June of 1994, past the enormous lines of people hoping to get a visa, and told a clerk that I wanted to give back my green card and apply for an H1B. He was dumbfounded. “Why?” he asked. I said something about the crazy immigration policy, he shook his head and pushed a new form to me. “Fill this out.” The next morning, I returned to apply for an H1B application. Miraculously, it all worked. Anu joined me (for good) in Seattle, where we would start a family and build a life together. What I didn’t expect was the instant notoriety around campus. “Hey, there goes the guy who gave up his green card.” Every other day someone would call me and ask for advice. Much later, one of my colleagues, Kunal Bahl, did quit Microsoft when his H1B ran out and his green card had not yet arrived. He returned to India and then founded Snapdeal, which today is worth more than $1 billion and employs five thousand people. Ironically, online, cloud-based companies like Snapdeal would play an important role in my future and that of Microsoft. And the lessons I learned in my former country continue to shape my present.

Chapter 2 Learning to Lead Seeing the Cloud Through Our Windows (#ulink_825ecd9b-4225-5171-b618-e4bce7e0f2a8)

I am obsessed with cricket. No matter where I am, this beautiful game is always in the back of my mind. The joy, the memories, the drama, the complexities, and the ups and downs—the infinite possibilities.

For those of you unfamiliar with cricket, it is an international sport played on a large green oval in the summer and early fall. Its popularity is strongest among the current and former nations of the British Commonwealth. Like baseball, in cricket a ball is hurled at a batter who endeavors to strike the ball and score as many runs as possible. The pitcher is a bowler, the batter is a batsman, the diamond is a wicket, and the fielders try to get the batsman out. Yes, there are forms of a match that can stretch on for days, but then in baseball teams compete to win 3-, 5-, and even 7-game series. Both sports are endlessly complex, but suffice it to say that the team with the most runs wins. This is not the book to describe the ins and outs of cricket, but it is a book that cannot avoid the metaphor of cricket and business.

Like most South Asians, I somehow fell in love with this most English of games on the dusty matting wickets of the Deccan Plateau in southern India.

There, on those fields, I learned a lot about myself—succeeding and failing as a bowler, a batsman, and a fielder. Even today I catch myself reflecting on the nuances within the cricket rulebook and the inherent grace of a team of eleven working together as one unit.

During the early years of my life when my father’s work as a civil servant took us to the district headquarters of Andhra Pradesh and the hills of Mussoorie in what is now Uttarakhand, cricket was not the phenomenon it is now. Today the Indian Premier League sells its ten-year television rights for billions. But back then it became a phenomenon for me, when at the age of eight, we moved to Hyderabad. We stayed in a rented house in the Somajiguda neighborhood, and our landlord, Mr. Ali, was a gracious and proud Hyderabadi, who wore his Osmania University cricket cap while working in his auto shop. He was full of stories about all the great Hyderabadi cricketers of the 1960s. He once took me to watch a first-class match between Hyderabad and Bombay (today’s Mumbai). It was my first time in the great cricket stadium Fateh Maidan. I was completely smitten that day with all the glamour of cricket. The athletes, M. L. Jaisimha, Abbas Ali Baig, Abid Ali, and Mumtaz Hussain, became my heroes. The Bombay side had Sunil Gavasker and Ashok Mankad, among many other stars. I don’t recall any of them making much of an impression, even though they beat Hyderabad handily. I was in awe of M. L. Jaisimha’s on-field presence—his fashionable upturned collar and distinctive gait. To this day I remember Mr. Ali’s descriptions of Mumtaz Hussain’s “mystery ball,” and watching Abid Ali charging down the wicket to a medium pacer.

Soon my dad was again transferred in his job, and I moved to attend school in Delhi. There I watched my first Test match at Feroz Shah Kotla. It was a match between India and England. Watching these two sides play left an indelible impression. I remember the English batsman Dennis Amiss and bowler John Lever combined to destroy India by an inning, leaving me distraught for weeks. Amiss hit a double hundred, and Lever, playing in his first Test match, bowled medium pace through that long afternoon, and the ball was swinging for him like I’d never seen before. Suddenly all the Indian players were back in the hut.

When I was ten I returned to Hyderabad, and for the next six years I truly and surely fell in love with cricket as a player for Hyderabad Public School (HPS). In fact, Mr. Jaisimha’s two children attended my school, and as a result we were surrounded by cricket glamour, tradition, and obsession. In those days, everyone was talking about the two India School players from HPS. One of them was Saad Bin Jung (who also happened to be the famous Indian cricket captain, Tiger Pataudi’s, nephew). Still in school, he went on to smash a hundred runs against a touring West Indian side while playing for South Zone, representing our region of southern India. I began playing on the B team and graduated to the senior team, which played in the A leagues of Hyderabad. We were the only school team to play in the A leagues as the other teams were sponsored by banks and miscellaneous companies. Ranji Trophy players would turn up in these league games, and all that intrigue made for intense competition.

What excited me then about cricket is what still excites me today, even living in a non-cricketing country (though, the United States over a hundred years ago did periodically host Australian and English sides). Cricket for me is like a wondrous Russian novel with plots and subplots played out over the course of multiple acts. In the end, one brilliant knock, or three deftly bowled balls, can change the complexion of a game.

There are three stories from my all-too-brief cricketing past that speak very directly to business and leadership principles I use even today as a CEO.

The first principle is to compete vigorously and with passion in the face of uncertainty and intimidation. In my school cricketing days, we played a team one summer that had several Australian players. During the match, our PE teacher, who acted as a sort of general manager for the team, noticed that we were admiring the Aussies’ play. In fact, we were more than a little intimidated by them. We had never played against foreign players, and Australia of course loomed large in the national cricket psyche. I now recognize our teacher and general manager as very much like an American football coach—loud and very competitive. He was having none of our admiration and intimidation. He began by yelling at the captain to get more aggressive. I was a bowler and a terrible fielder but he positioned me at forward short leg, right beside the powerful Australian batsmen. I would have been happy standing far away, but he put me right next to the action. In time, with new energy and new focus, we transformed into a competitive team. It showed me that you must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe. Go and compete.

On reflection, a second principle is simply the importance of putting your team first, ahead of your personal statistics and recognition. One of my teams had a brilliant fast bowler. He was one of the most promising young cricketers in the land. He became even greater after attending a U-19 South Zone coaching clinic. His pace and accuracy were just brilliant. As a tail-end batsman myself, being in the nets (similar to baseball batting cages) against this guy was tough. But he had a self-destructive mindset. During one game our captain decided to replace him with another bowler. Soon, the new bowler coaxed the opposing batsman to mis-hit a ball skyward, an easy catch for our cantankerous teammate now at mid-off, a fielding position twenty-five to thirty yards from the batsman. Rather than take a simple catch, he plunged both hands deep into his pockets and watched passively as the ball fell right in front of him. He was a star player, and we looked on in complete disbelief. The lesson? One brilliant character who does not put team first can destroy the entire team.

There are of course many lessons and principles one can take from cricket, but for me a third is the central importance of leadership. Looking back, I remember one particular match in which my off-spin bowling was getting hammered by the opponents. I was serving up very ordinary stuff. Our team captain in retrospect showed me what real leadership looks like. When my over had ended (that is, when I had thrown six balls), he replaced me with himself even though he was a better batsman than bowler. He quickly took the wicket—the batsman was out. Customarily taking a wicket that efficiently would argue for him remaining in as a bowler. But instead, he immediately handed the ball back to me and I took seven wickets of my own. Why did he do it? I surmised he wanted me to get my confidence back. It was early in the season and he needed me to be effective all year. He was an empathetic leader, and he knew that if I lost my confidence it would be hard to get it back. That is what leadership is about. It’s about bringing out the best in everyone. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of an individual and a team. I think that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading. That team captain went on to play many years of prestigious Ranji Trophy competition, and he taught me a very valuable lesson.

Those early lessons from cricket shaped my leadership style, as have my experiences as a husband, a father, a young Microsoft engineer thrilled to be part of our company’s visionary ascent, and later as an executive charged with building new businesses. My approach has never been to conduct business as usual. Instead it’s been to focus on culture and imagine what’s possible. The culmination of these experiences has provided the raw material for the transformation we are undergoing today—a set of principles based on the alchemy of purpose, innovation, and empathy.

* * *

The arrival of our son, Zain, in August 1996 had been a watershed moment in Anu’s and my life together. His suffering from asphyxia in utero, had changed our lives in ways we had not anticipated. We came to understand life’s problems as something that cannot always be solved in the manner we want. Instead we had to learn to cope. When Zain came home from the intensive care unit (ICU), Anu internalized this understanding immediately. There were multiple therapies to be administered to him every day, not to mention quite a few surgeries he needed that called for strenuous follow-up care after nerve-racking ICU stays. All this entailed Anu lovingly placing him in the infant car seat and driving him, day after day, from the early hours of the day, from therapist to therapist, not to mention frequent visits to the ICU unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Children’s became a second home for our family as Zain’s medical file grew to over a foot high. We are today, as we always have been, so indebted to the staff at Children’s who have loved and cared for Zain throughout his life from infancy to young adulthood.

During one ICU visit, after I took on my new role as CEO, I looked around Zain’s room, filled with the soft buzzing and beeping of medical technology, and saw things differently. I noticed just how many of the devices ran on Windows and how they were increasingly connected to the cloud, that network of massive data storage and computational power that is now a fundamental part of the technology applications we take for granted today. It was a stark reminder that our work at Microsoft transcended business, that it made life itself possible for a fragile young boy. It also brought a new level of gravity to the looming decisions back at the office on our cloud and Windows 10 upgrades. We’d better get this right, I remember thinking to myself.

My son’s condition requires that I draw daily upon the very same passion for ideas and empathy that I learned from my parents. And I do this both at home and at work. Whether I am meeting with people in Latin America, the Middle East, or one of the inner cities of America, I am always searching to understand people’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Being an empathetic father, and bringing that desire to discover what is at the core, the soul, makes me a better leader.

But it is impossible to be an empathetic leader sitting in an office behind a computer screen all day. An empathetic leader needs to be out in the world, meeting people where they live and seeing how the technology we create affects their daily activities. So many people around the world today depend on mobile and cloud technologies without knowing it. Hospitals, schools, businesses, and researchers rely on what’s referred to as the “public cloud”—an array of large-scale, privacy-protected computers and data services accessible over a public network. Cloud computing makes it possible to analyze vast quantities of data to produce specific insights and intelligence, converting guesswork and speculation into predictive power. It has the power to transform lives, companies, and societies.

Traveling the globe as CEO, I’ve seen example after example of this interplay between empathy and technology.

Both in the state where I was born and the state in which I now live, schools use the power of cloud computing to analyze large amounts of data to uncover insights that can improve dropout rates. In Andhra Pradesh in India, and in Tacoma, Washington, too many kids drop out of school. The problem is lack of resources, not lack of ambition. Cloud technology is helping improve outcomes for kids and families as intelligence from cloud data is now predicting which students are most likely to drop out of school so that resources can be focused on providing them the help they need.

Thanks to mobile and cloud technologies, a startup in Kenya has built a solar grid that people living on less than two dollars a day can lease to have safe, low-cost lighting and efficient cookstoves, replacing polluting and dangerous kerosene power. It’s an ingenious plan because the startup can effectively create a credit rating, a byproduct of the service, which, for the first time, gives these Kenyans access to capital. This innovative mobile phone payment system enables customers living in Kenya’s sprawling slums to make forty-cent daily payments for solar light, which in turn generates data that establishes a credit history to finance other needs.

A university in Greece, leveraging cloud data, is working with firefighters in that country to predict and prevent massive wildfires like the one in 2007 that killed eighty-four people and burned 670,000 acres. Firefighters are now armed with intelligence on the rate of the fire’s spread, intensity, movement of the perimeter, proximity to water supply, and microclimate weather forecasts from remote sensors, enabling them to catch fires early, saving lives and property.

In Sweden, researchers are using cloud technologies to ensure that children are screened earlier and more accurately for dyslexia, a reading disorder that impacts educational outcomes for millions. Eye movement data analyzed at schools today can be compared with a data set from those diagnosed with dyslexia thirty years ago. Diagnostic accuracy rates have increased from 70 to 95 percent, and the time to get a diagnosis has decreased from three years to three minutes. This means students, parents, and schools are prepared earlier and struggle less.

In Japan, crowd-sourced data collected from hundreds of sensors nationwide helped the public monitor radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant to reduce risks to food quality and transportation. The 13 million measurements from five hundred remote sensors generated a heat map that alerted authorities to threats to local rice production.

And in Nepal, after the devastating earthquake there in April 2015, disaster relief workers from the United Nations used the public cloud to collect and analyze massive amounts of data about schools, hospitals, and homes to speed up access to compensatory entitlements, relief packages, and other assistance.

Today it’s hard to imagine devices that are not connected to the cloud. Consumer applications like O365, LinkedIn, Uber, and Facebook all live in the cloud. There’s a great scene in Sylvester Stallone’s Creed, the latest of his Rocky movie series. The champ jots down on a piece of paper a workout regimen for his protégé, who quickly snaps a photo of it on his smartphone. As the kid jogs away, Rocky yells, “Don’t you want the paper?”

“I got it right here, it’s already up in the cloud,” the kid replies.