Working at Microsoft has more than its fair share of Catch-22 moments, which are usually generated by the policy-making machine that is management.
A post-industrial corporation aligned to a military-industrial organizational ziggurat that contains its own priesthoods and secret societies that represent the most complex feudal society ever created, Microsoft's management ranges from the almost holy to the profane, the strong to the weak, and the insipid to the inspired.
Depending upon your point of view (internal or external), current management at Microsoft ranges from excellent to incompetent. A closer look reveals a more quantum mechanical view of things though: superimposed states that are both terrible and wonderful. Applying Mr. Heisenberg's lens, we see the greatest wealth creation team in history and the greatest mass destroyers of shareholder value ever.
But Microsoft has always been about extremes. Never content to sit in the comfortable middle, it thrives at the boundary layer, gulping oxygen when it can, but sometimes it just burns.
Recently, from this Softie's viewpoint, It burns us, yes it does.
Senior leadership is without a clue and mostly absent, and this has left the rank-and-file managers to figure it out on their own.
This is a sorry state of affairs.
So, in the interest of trying to help kick-start a moribund leadership culture back into what HR wonks called "engagement", the goal of my blog is to shine that spotlight into the dark nooks and crannies of leadership and management at Microsoft, and find constructive ways to break up the logjam that is a multi-billion dollar impacted management team.
Ground rules: constructive comments only, please. Comments are being moderated. Stay on topic.
Stand by for part one: Whither Microsoft's Management Style?
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