Challenging Ourselves to Change the World

When I was a kid, I loved playing with Lego. I went through it by the boxful, dreaming up new things to build.

I am sure I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back, that was probably the start of the path that led me to Microsoft, a company that continues to dream up how to build new things and change the world. 

I learned two things. First, think big. Second, enabling customers to touch and use the product is what sold it.

I originally thought I would follow in my father’s footsteps and be an entrepreneur. Yet I started my career as a lawyer, inspired during a high school visit to the Supreme Court of Canada, where I met many famous Canadian lawyers. And while I did love the practice of law, I realized I was missing a creative element in my life.

That is when I joined Microsoft. My first role with the company was at our corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, as part of the global launch team for Windows Server 2003. My second day on the job, my boss’ boss said “welcome aboard, I want you to train 25,000 IT professionals on our new product over the next four months.”

In the end, it actually took us five months to reach 30,000 IT specialists. And I learned two things. First, think big. Second, enabling customers to touch and use the product is what sold it. They realized how they could save their organization money and make their own jobs better – and that directly translated into early adoption, sales and market success.

The experience taught me something that has become a cornerstone of my career: you first have to really put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Whether you’re dealing with a CEO, CIO or CMO, you have to listen carefully and understand how you can help them solve the problem or seize a new opportunity. Build an innovative solution that addresses their needs better than anybody else, and you’ve got a loyal new customer. And you need to continue to earn that loyalty every day. 

Every day I ask my team, what can we do to accelerate our impact on the world? We discuss innovative ways to enable SMBs to use the cloud to rapidly expand their business, support enterprises to achieve faster time-to-market with new products or services, and help government prepare students for the workforce of the future. 

In the past two years, my work with Microsoft has taken me to 42 countries and I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to see first-hand how technology and great ideas are enabling success. 

In Latin America, I had the chance to meet two developers with a great idea for a Facebook app. They built it on Microsoft Azure which gave them access to unlimited servers in the cloud. Their business idea went viral – from 5,000 users to 50,000 to 5,000,000 in less than a year! Before the cloud, they would never have succeeded because they would never have been able to meet the demand. That’s the power of the cloud – unlimited capacity, no upfront capital expenditures and a pay-as-you-go model.

We live in remarkable times, and it’s an incredible period to be in technology.

And there are many more possibilities to come. For example, Microsoft Research has pioneered a way deliver internet connectivity leveraging unused TV spectrum (yep very technical). So imagine being able to Skype with children in a remote village in Africa using a laptop powered by solar energy. I can tell you, it’s pretty amazing. 

We live in remarkable times, and it’s an incredible period to be in technology. There’s a lot more on the horizon in the areas of mobility, cloud, big data, machine learning and voice recognition to name just a few. Creative use of technology is literally changing the world, and we continue to build new things never before imagined. 

If you have kids, take my advice and give them some Lego. You never know where it might lead.

image courtesy of oxfordstudent.com