First, we needed to obsess about our customers. At the core of our business must be the curiosity and desire to meet a customer’s unarticulated and unmet needs with great technology. There is no way to do that unless we absorb with deeper insight and empathy what they need. To me this was not something abstract, but rather something we all get to practice each day. When we talk to customers, we need to listen. It’s not an idle exercise. It is about being able to predict things that customers will love. That’s growth mindset. We learn about our customers and their businesses with a beginner’s mind and then bring them solutions that meet their needs. We need to be insatiable in our desire to learn from the outside and bring that learning into Microsoft, while still innovating to surprise and delight our users.

To encourage the shift toward a learning culture, we created an annual hackathon during our OneWeek celebration, a time for everyone to be on campus simultaneously to make connections, learn about what others are doing, find inspiration, and collaborate. Playing off the notion of growth mindset, the hack made perfect sense. Within the subculture of computer programmers, hacking is a time-honored tradition of working around limitations and creatively solving a difficult problem or opportunity. In that first year, more than twelve thousand employees from eighty-three countries entered more than three thousand hacks ranging from ending sexism in video games to making computing more accessible to people with disabilities to improving industrial supply-chain operations.

Even though I am ambivalent about questions from outsiders about how the culture change is going, it’s easy to see there is a tangible shift happening inside Microsoft. If you want to understand the culture inside a software company, show up at a meeting that includes engineers from different parts of the company. These are very smart people who are passionate about building great products. But are they plugged into what customers need and want? Do they include diverse opinions and capabilities when writing code? And do they act like they’re on the same team, even if they work in different groups? Answers to questions like these serve as a great barometer for the culture we need. Demonstrating a growth mindset. Customer-centric. Diverse and inclusive. One company.