Satya Nadella is the CEO of the World's Most Valuable company and was named Fortune's Businessman of the year.
In 2013, then current CEO Steve Ballmer announced his departure and to many people's surprise, Microsoft chose Satya Nadella as his replacement. Many questioned the choice as Nadella was not a founder like Bill Gates or even a big personality like other CEOs in the spotlight. But, the new CEO went on to lead some of Microsoft's biggest acquisitions.
In 2016 Microsoft acquired Linkedin for $26.2 billion dollars and in 2018, the company acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion dollars. In time, Nadella turned Microsoft into a mobile and cloud company. With this, Nadella transitioned Microsoft into a company of the future.
Nadella's work was validated when on April 25th of this year, Microsoft hit the $1 trillion value mark, up 230 percent since his start at the helm of the company. Another high point for the tech giant, Microsoft earned $39 Billion in revenue for the fiscal year of 2019. That means Microsoft is growing its profit at a three year compound annual rate of 11 percent. The company won the $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract with the Pentagon in October, and more recently in November, Microsoft had another win, announcing that its workplace messaging app has 20 million daily active users, surpassing rival, Slack.
And to what does Nadella credit the success of the company? His reliance on others. "I'm wired to be fairly confident in myself and to let others shine," the CEO told Fortune.
Can Satya Nadella roll his momentum into 2020? In a crowd of noisy business leaders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, it looks like the former underdog, Satya Nadella could be most likely to succeed.
