Hit Refresh
Satya Nadella
Chapter 1: From Hyderabad to Redmond
The answers were hard to pull out, even though they were just beneath the surface. Fear: of being ridiculed; of failing; of not looking like the smartest person in the room. And arrogance: I am too important for these games. “What a stupid question,” we had grown used to hearing.
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a hunger to learn—whether it be from a line of poetry, from a conversation with a friend, or from a lesson with a teacher. My personal philosophy and my passion, developed over time and through exposure to many different experiences, is to connect new ideas with a growing sense of empathy for other people. Ideas excite me. Empathy grounds and centers me.
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Each leader was no longer solely employed by Microsoft, they had tapped into a higher calling—to employ Microsoft in pursuit of their personal passions to empower others. It was an emotional and exhausting day, but it set a new tone and put in motion a more unified leadership team. At the end of the day, we all came to the same stark realization: No one leader, no one group, and no one CEO would be the hero of Microsoft’s renewal. If there was to be a renewal, it would take all of us and all parts of each of us. Cultural transformation would be slow and trying before it would be rewarding.
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Every person, organization, and even society reaches a point at which they owe it to themselves to hit refresh—to reenergize, renew, reframe, and rethink their purpose. If only it were as easy as punching that little refresh button on your browser. Sure, in this age of continuous updates and always-on technologies, hitting refresh may sound quaint, but still when it’s done right, when people and cultures re-create and refresh, a renaissance can be the result. Sports franchises do it. Apple did it. Detroit is doing it. One day ascending companies like Facebook will stop growing, and they will have to do it too.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Chapter 2: Learning to Lead
The first principle is to compete vigorously and with passion in the face of uncertainty and intimidation.
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It showed me that you must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe. Go and compete.
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On reflection, a second principle is simply the importance of putting your team first, ahead of your personal statistics and recognition.
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The lesson? One brilliant character who does not put team first can destroy the entire team.
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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.
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Building Bing taught us about scale, experimentation-led design, applied ML, and auction-based pricing. These skills are not only mission critical at our company, but highly sought after throughout today’s technology universe.
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few tasks are more difficult than building a lasting institution. The choice of leading through consensus versus fiat is a false one. Any institution-building comes from having a clear vision and culture that works to motivate progress both top-down and bottom-up.
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In my meetings with customers I would usually bring other leaders and engineers along so that we could learn together. On one trip to the Bay Area, we met with several startups. It became clear that we needed to support the Linux operating system, and we had already taken some rudimentary steps toward that with Azure. But as Scott Guthrie and our team walked out of those meetings that day, it was certain that we needed to make first-class support for Linux in Azure. We made that decision by the time we got to the parking lot.
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This may sound like a purely technical dilemma, but it also posed a profound cultural challenge. Dogma at Microsoft had long held that the open-source software from Linux was the enemy. We couldn’t afford to cling to that attitude any longer. We had to meet the customers where they were and, more importantly, we needed to ensure that we viewed our opportunity not through a rearview mirror, but with a more future-oriented perspective. We changed the name of the product from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure to make it clear that our cloud was not just about Windows.
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A leader must see the external opportunities and the internal capability and culture—and all of the connections among them—and respond to them before they become obvious parts of the conventional wisdom.
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It’s an art form, not a science. And a leader will not always get it right. But the batting average for how well a leader does this is going to define his or her longevity in business.
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Chapter 3: New Mission, New Momentum
Steve Jobs understood what the soul of a company is. He once said that “design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” I agree. Apple will always remain true to its soul as long as its inner voice, its motivation, is about great design for consumer products. The soul of our company is different. I knew that Microsoft needed to regain its soul as the company that makes powerful technology accessible to everyone and every organization—democratizing technology.
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It might be easy to be motivated to change through envy. We could envy what Apple had built with its iPhone and its iPad franchise, or what Google had created with its low-cost Android phones and tablets. But envy is negative and outer-directed, not driven from within, and so I knew that it wouldn’t carry us very far down the path to true renewal.
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We could also motivate ourselves through competitive zeal. Microsoft is known for rallying the troops with competitive fire. The press loves that, but it’s not me. My approach is to lead with a sense of purpose and pride in what we do, not envy or combativeness.
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We needed a senior leadership team (SLT) that would lean into each other’s problems, promote dialogue, and be effective. We needed everyone to view the SLT as his or her first team, not just another meeting they attended. We needed to be aligned on mission, strategy, and culture.
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think of the SLT as a sort of Legion of Superheroes, with each leader coming to the table with a unique superpower to contribute for the common good.
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Over time I would realize that while the death of a parent is painful, my mom is always there in my consciousness. She will always be there. Her calm and mindfulness continue to shape my relationships with people and the world around me to this day.
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What was the spirit behind the first line of code ever written for the BASIC interpreter on that primitive computer, the Altair? It was to empower people. And that was still what motivated all of our efforts: to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We are in the empowerment business, I said as I took the stage, and not just to empower startups and tech-savvy users on the American West Coast, but everyone on the planet. Helping people and their organizations achieve more is our sweet spot. That’s what informs our decisions and inspires our passion; it’s also what makes us different from other companies. We make things that help other people make things and make things happen.
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First, we must reinvent productivity and business processes. We needed to evolve beyond simply building individual productivity tools and start designing an intelligent fabric for computing based on four principles—collaboration, mobility, intelligence, and trust.
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Second, we will build the intelligent cloud platform, an ambition closely linked with the first ambition. Every organization today needs new cloud-based infrastructure and applications that can convert vast amounts of data into predictive and analytical power through the use of advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI.
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Third, we needed to move people from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows by creating more personal computing. Just as we would transform business and society through cloud computing, we also needed to revolutionize the workplace to help organizations and people be more productive.
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Amy Hood, our CFO, understood the culture change we needed to navigate. She also became the crucial partner I needed for precise attention to quantitative detail across the business. Her job is where the rubber meets the road. Ahead of my first financial analyst meeting, Amy helped to translate the mission and ambitions into language and goals investors needed to hear. She helped, for example, shape the goal to build a $20 billion cloud business, something investors grabbed on to and tracked quarter after quarter. It took us from a defensive frame amid falling PC and phone share to an offensive mindset. We went from deflection to ownership of our future.
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Getting our strategy right had preoccupied me from the beginning. But as management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
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Culture is how an organization thinks and acts, but individuals shape it.
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Earlier in the year, Anu had handed me a copy of Dr. Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dr. Dweck’s research is about overcoming failures by believing you can. “The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.” She divides the world between learners and non-learners, demonstrating that a fixed mindset will limit you and a growth mindset can move you forward. The hand you are dealt is just the starting point. Passion, toil, and training can help you to soar.
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“We can have all the bold ambitions. We can have all the bold goals. We can aspire to our new mission. But it’s only going to happen if we live our culture, if we teach our culture. And to me that model of culture is not a static thing. It is about a dynamic learning culture. In fact, the phrase we use to describe our emerging culture is ‘growth mindset,’ because it’s about every individual, every one of us having that attitude—that mindset—of being able to overcome any constraint, stand up to any challenge, making it possible for us to grow and, thereby, for the company to grow.” I told my colleagues that I was not talking bottom-line growth. I was talking about our individual growth.
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Our culture needed to be about realizing our personal passions and using Microsoft as a platform to pursue that passion. For me, my greatest satisfaction has come from my passion to see technology become more accessible for people with disabilities and to help improve their lives in a myriad of ways.
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Chapter 4: A Cultural Renaissance
The culture change I wanted was actually rooted in the Microsoft I originally joined. It was centered on exercising a growth mindset every day in three distinct ways.
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First, we needed to obsess about our customers.
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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.
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Second, we are at our best when we actively seek diversity and inclusion.
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The diversity of our workforce must continue to improve, and we need to include a wide range of opinions and perspectives in our thinking and decision making. In every meeting, don’t just listen—make it possible for others to speak so that everyone’s ideas come through.
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Finally, we are one company, one Microsoft—not a confederation of fiefdoms. Innovation and competition don’t respect our silos, our org boundaries, so we have to learn to transcend those barriers.
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Anyone who says they can accurately predict the future trajectory of tech is not to be trusted. However, a growth mindset enables you to better anticipate and react to uncertainties. Fear of the unknown can send you in a million directions, and sometimes it just dead-ends with inertia.
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A leader has to have an idea what to do—to innovate in the face of fear and inertia. We need to be willing to lean into uncertainty, to take risks, and to move quickly when we make mistakes, recognizing failure happens along the way to mastery. Sometimes it feels like a bird learning to fly. You flap around for a while, and then you run around.
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Learning to fly is not pretty but flying is.
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A manager can be demanding, but must also have the empathy to figure out what will motivate employees. Likewise, an employee is right to put his or her head down and work hard, but they also have the right to expect a pathway to greater responsibility and recognition when they do. There must be balance.
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I told these high-potential leaders that once you become a vice president, a partner in this endeavor, the whining is over. You can’t say the coffee around here is bad, or there aren’t enough good people, or I didn’t get the bonus.
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“To be a leader in this company, your job is to find the rose petals in a field of shit.”
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The first is to bring clarity to those you work with. This is one of the foundational things leaders do every day, every minute.
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Second, leaders generate energy, not only on their own teams but across the company.
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Leaders need to inspire optimism, creativity, shared commitment, and growth through times good and bad. They create an environment where everyone can do his or her best work. And they build organizations and teams that are stronger tomorrow than today.
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Third, and finally, they find a way to deliver success, to make things happen. This means driving innovations that people love and are inspired to work on; finding balance between long-term success and short-term wins; and being boundary-less and globally minded in seeking solutions.
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Leadership can be a lonely business. It can also be a noisy place. When a leader steps into the arena, especially in today’s loud echo chamber of social media, he or she can be tempted to make decisions that will result in instant gratification. But we have to look beyond the temporal, discounting what someone will write in this moment’s tweet or tomorrow’s news.
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Chapter 5: Friends or Frenemies?
When I became CEO, I sensed we had forgotten how our talent for partnerships was a key to what made us great. It’s the kind of thing that can happen to any great company. Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place. We knew we needed to retrain our partnership muscles. We had to look anew at our industry and find ways to add value for our customers whether they were on an Apple device, a Linux platform, or an Adobe product.
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Chapter 6: Beyond the Cloud
Forecasting technology trends can be perilous. It’s been said we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in the short run, but underestimate what can be achieved in the long run. But we are investing to lead in three key technologies that will shape our industry and others in the years to come—mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
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MR, AI, and quantum may be independent threads today, but they are going to come together. We’re betting on it. A technology company that misses multiple trends like these will inevitably fall behind. At the same time, of course, it’s dangerous to chase untested future technologies while neglecting the core of the current business.
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That’s the classic innovator’s dilemma—to risk existing success while pursuing new opportunities.
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Historically, Microsoft has struggled at times to get this balance right. We actually had a tablet before the iPad; we were well along the path toward an e-reader before the Kindle. But in some cases our software was ahead of the key components required for success, such as touchscreen hardware or broadband connectivity. In other cases, we lacked end-to-end design thinking to bring a complete solution to market. We also got a bit overconfident in our ability to fast-follow a competitor, forgetting that there is inherent risk in such a strategy. We were perhaps timid in disrupting our own highly successful business models. We’ve learned from all this. There is no formula to inventing the future. A company has to have a complete vision for what it can uniquely do, and then back it up with conviction and the capability to make it happen.
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To avoid being trapped by the innovator’s dilemma—and to move from always focusing on the urgency of today to considering the important things for tomorrow—we decided to look at our investment strategy across three growth horizons: first, grow today’s core businesses and technologies; second, incubate new ideas and products for the future; and third, invest in long-term breakthroughs.
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Engelbart’s Law states that the rate of human performance is exponential; that while technology will augment our capabilities, our ability to improve upon improvements is a uniquely human endeavor. He essentially founded the field of human-computer interaction.
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two futuristic novels were being eagerly consumed by engineers all over campus. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash popularized the term metaverse, envisioning a collective virtual and shared space. David Gelernter wrote Mirror Worlds, foreseeing software that would revolutionize computing and transform society by replacing reality with a digital imitation.
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It is a magical feeling, at least for me, the first time you experience a profound new technology.
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Alex is very philosophical and turned to Nietzsche for direction: “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how.’” Alex was upset with himself because he did not yet have his “why,” a point of view about where computing should be headed.
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“I am going to make machines that perceive the real world.” Perception—not a mouse, keyboard, and screen—would be the protagonist of his story. Machines that perceive us became his “why.”
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On the computer vision and learning front, in late 2015 our AI group swept first prize across five challenges even though we only trained our system for one of those challenges. In the Common Objects in Context challenge, an AI system attempts to solve several visual recognition tasks. We trained our system to accomplish just the first one, simply to look at a photograph and label what it sees. Yet, through early forms of transfer learning, the neural network we built managed to learn and then accomplish the other tasks on its own. It not only could explain the photograph, but it was also able to draw a circle around every distinct object in the photograph and produce an English sentence that described the action it saw in the photo.
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But just because a machine can see and hear doesn’t mean it can truly learn and understand. Natural language understanding, the interaction between computers and humans, is the next frontier.
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BESPOKE. Today we are very much on the ground floor of AI. It is bespoke, customized. Tech companies with privileged access to data, computing power, and algorithms handcraft an AI product and make it available to the world. Only a few can make AI for the many. This is where most AI is today.
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Chapter 7: The Trust Equation
The dilemma framed by each of these high-profile cases—Sony, Snowden, San Bernardino, and the Irish data center—is the conflict between protecting individual liberties of privacy and free speech and civil society requirements like public safety. This conflict creates a moral or ethical dilemma, one which, of course, has been debated throughout history.
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Chapter 8: The Future of Humans and Machines
a small computer that he wears like a pair of sunglasses. The technology disambiguates and interprets data in real time, essentially painting a picture of the world and conveying it to Saqib audibly instead of visually. This tool allows Saqib to experience the world in richer ways—for example, by connecting a noise on the street to a stunt performed by a nearby skateboarder or sudden silence in a meeting to what coworkers might be thinking.
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AI must be designed to assist humanity. Even as we build more autonomous machines, we need to respect human autonomy. Collaborative robots (co-bots) should take on dangerous work like mining, thus creating a safety net and safeguards for human workers.
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AI must be transparent. All of us, not just tech experts, should be aware of how the technology works and what its rules are. We want not just intelligent machines but intelligible machines; not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic intelligence. The technology will know things about humans, but the humans must also know about how the technology sees and analyzes the world.
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AI must have algorithmic accountability so that humans can undo unintended harm. We must design these technologies for the expected and the unexpected.
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CREATIVITY—One of the most coveted human skills is creativity, and this won’t change. Machines will enrich and augment our creativity, but the human drive to create will remain central.
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In their first report, Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030, the study panel noted that AI and robotics will be applied “across the globe in industries struggling to attract younger workers, such as agriculture, food processing, fulfillment centers and factories.”
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While there is no clear road map for what lies ahead, in previous industrial revolutions we’ve seen society transition, not always smoothly, through a series of phases. First, we invent and design the technologies of transformation, which is where we are today. Second, we retrofit for the future. We’ll be entering this phase shortly. For example, drone pilots will need training; conversion of traditional cars into autonomous vehicles will require redesign and rebuilding. Third, we navigate distortion, dissonance, and dislocation. This phase will raise challenging new questions. What is a radiologist’s job when the machines can read the X-ray better? What is the function of a lawyer when computers can detect legal patterns in millions of documents that no human can spot?
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Today we don’t think of aviation as “artificial flight”—it’s simply flight. In the same way, we shouldn’t think of technological intelligence as artificial, but rather as intelligence that serves to augment human capabilities and capacities.
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Chapter 9: Restoring Economic Growth for Everyone
“Although automation tends to reduce employment and the share of labor in national income, the creation of more complex tasks has the opposite effect.”
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“The creation of new complex tasks always increases wages, employment and share of labor. But when automation runs ahead of the process of creation of new, labor-intensive tasks, technological change will bring lower employment.” We need a balanced growth path. We need to invent a new social contract for this age of AI and automation that fosters the equilibrium between individual labor—one’s agency, wages, sense of purpose, and fulfillment—and the return on capital.
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“Business is humanity’s most resilient, iterative, and productive mechanism for creating change in the world.”
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Afterword
Some argue that robots will take all our jobs, but this so-called “lump of labor” argument—the notion that there is a limited amount of work available—has always been disproved. It’s just that different types of labor will be needed.
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