Microsoft CEO Nadella: 'Culture is everything'

Marco della Cava | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption A force to be reckoned with Under the direction of CEO Marc Benioff, Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference is increasingly becoming San Francisco's dominant tech industry confab.

SAN FRANCISCO — For Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the culture created inside the walls of any company isn't just important, "it's everything."

Nadella, who spoke with USA TODAY in anticipation of his keynote address Tuesday at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce customer event, says "ultimately what any company does when it is successful is merely a lagging indicator of its existing culture.

"At Microsoft, we're aspiring to have a living, learning culture with a growth mindset that allows us to learn from ourselves and our customers," he says. "These are the key attributes of the new culture at Microsoft, and I feel great about how it seems to be resonating and how it's seen as empowering."

The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant has been in the throes of a small cultural revolution, one largely guided by longtime employee Nadella. Where Microsoft's ethos under predecessors such as Steve Ballmer and co-founder Bill Gates had autocratic and anti-Silicon Valley overtones, the company has made concerted efforts in the past few years to both promote internal dialog as well as forge external relationships.

Where Microsoft employees once received mandates from the C-suite, today they share ideas at company-wide hackathons. And where Microsoft once had combative relationships with rivals such as Apple, today the company has forged a variety of new partnerships with Salesforce, Box, as well as Apple. These moves are seen by many analysts as make-or-break plays to try and position Microsoft for growth in a competitive cloud- and mobile-first world.

Another big tech issue of the day is finding talent, due to a small pool of engineers being chased by a growing number of tech enterprises. In Silicon Valley, new hires are often wooed by six-figure salaries and promises of perks ranging from in-house chefs to flexible work schedules. Given such lavish overtures, a recent report in The New York Times that described a toxic work environment at Amazon caused a stir in social media circles.

Nadella doesn't hesitate when asked about the Amazon workplace debate, though he doesn't mention the cross-town company by name.

"The notion of having work-life harmony in a highly competitive economy is a first-class topic," says Nadella. "I think the key is to make sure you're engaging in a dialog with your employees. There also needs to be flexibility in all the (workplace) policies that someone like me sets and propagates. You cannot have people burn out. It's bad for your company, and it's bad for society."

As for what his keynote address to Salesforce customers will stress, Nadella quickly gets to the point.

"I will talk about two sets of things," he says. "One is how productivity and collaboration are reinventing the nature of work, and how this will be very important for the global economy. And two, data. In other words, the profound impact of digital technology that stems from data and the data feedback loop."

Follow USA TODAY technology and culture reporter Marco della Cava: @marcodellacava