In another introspective but bumbling memo to employees, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella continued to jam his foot further into his mouth and add salt to the wounds of laid off employees.
Reflecting on 15 years of Azure cloud services, he emphasized the importance of having a long term vision, coupled with short term employment.
Referencing their sticktoitiveness philosophy regarding Azure, the CEO wrote: “There were challenges, but we stayed the course, compounding small gains quarter-after-quarter and earning our customers’ trust—and here we are laying off as many employees in a month as we did in our first five years!”
Focusing on the big game approach, he elaborated: “This is what’s required to make long-term progress: have a bold vision, complete the thought, and persist through all the bugs, critical security vulnerabilities, massive customer outages, and hotfix after hotfix after hotfix. And that is what makes Microsoft unique: our ability to think in decades and layoff employees in quarters.”
Highlighting the importance of long term impact, he asked employees: “What are you working on today that you have such conviction on, that 15 years from now, when you are most assuredly still no longer employed with us, you will look back and say, ‘We got it right!’?”
Aligning to this bold vision, a new compensation strategy was announced. “To that end, we are announcing a new Core Priority that will be part of every employee Connect – the “Impact to Tenure Ratio”. The higher the impact and the shorter the tenure, will result in achieving the maximum compensation. We want employees who deliver the most while staying with us the least, and we are willing to reward handsomely for that.”