> “Nadella is a repeat befuddler. His first email to employees, sent just after he assumed the CEO mantel on earlier this year, was filled with bombastic and false platitudes:”
mantel: a beam, stone, or arch serving as a lintel to support the masonry above a fireplace
mantle: a figurative cloak symbolizing preeminence or authority <accepted the mantle of leadership>
That's advice for life.
For example, the 2gether NHS Foundation Trust (a Mental Heath trust for Gloucestershire and Hereford) has trust values. The first is "Seeing things from the service user's perspective". This sounds uncontroversial and obvious hut many people (clinicians (in and out of MH); social workers; police; teachers; etc) who come into contact with people with MH problems are ignorant to the point of bigotry and so it's a useful value to have, to remind staff that often people who are saying odd things are not doing so as a function of illness, but because it is their actual lived experience.
One quick examples:
When I say I don't think Heath House Hospital in Bristol ("Bristol Priory") is safe partly because of the Robert Mugabe torturer it sounds like a feature of illness. But actually, Heath House hospital did employ someone who had illegally entered the UK and was using forged documents, and that person used to work for Mugabe as a torturer.
I've learned that the most successful C-levels will almost never commit anything substantive to writing. Send them an email looking for direction and it's always, "Let's talk about that tomorrow". There are a lot of strong political reasons for that.
But at his level, you're gonna get ambushed by someone no matter what you write.
http://techpinions.com/microsoft-is-the-very-antithesis-of-s...
Also for a article picking on statements from others, statements like "Surface is an attempt to pretend Apple didn’t solve the tablet problem when they introduced the iPad. " seems plain stupid since Android has taken the lead from Apple and I don't think anybody believes the tablet "problem" is solved yet
Have you read some of the communication coming out of Facebook and Salesforce? Jesus, just walk around Facebook's campus and you'll see ridiculous motivational posters that say things like, "DEMAND EXCELLENCE!"
Because the "whoever" who wrote the article is Jean-Louis Gassée, who as an executive of Apple and Be, Inc had half a lifetime of an adversarial relationship with Microsoft.
To me, it, appears to be an attempt to deceive rather than enlighten, and it certainly wouldn't give me a good attitude nor make me feel better about the company.
But I don't work for those kind of companies, and maybe the people who do have a high tolerance for this kind of behavior by now. I guess it beats a guy walking around the halls swinging a baseball bat and dashing about the stage like a wild man during company pep rallies.
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You can only boldly tell what you're going to do if you know what you're going to do.
When in Enterprise, write as the middle managers do.
