Satya Nadella spent more than two decades climbing the ladder at Microsoft before becoming CEO in 2014. But looking back, the billionaire recently admitted that he once failed to speak up when he believed the company was making the wrong call—and is still haunted by the memory today.
Nadella recalled a meeting around 2008–09, convened by then-chairman Bill Gates, to review a potential acquisition involving a team working on parallel data warehousing. Nadella, who was leading Microsoft’s search engine team at the time, thought the deal made little sense.
