The hot topic these days is none other than what ails Sri Lanka cricket, with this turmoil surrounding us it is worthwhile looking at this grate game from a different angle, an angle as sharp as it could be. His views on cricket by Satya Nadella, the Hyderabad-born CEO of Microsoft, the third largest technology giant in the world. During an interview Nadella had with ESPN Cricinfo, courtesy Andrew Miller UK, Editor.
In an age of corporate jargon, baseball is the boardroom king, with “curveballs” and “ballpark figures” flying in from “left-field” in business meetings the world over. But for the man in the hot seat of one of the most iconic US corporations of them all, a whole different ball game has always held sway.
According to the Forbes rankings. “He grew up with it, he played under some amazing captains, and ever since. He thought, even in his day job, he reflected back on the lessons learned on the dusty fields of the Deccan Plateau,” in South India.
Nadella’s career trajectory epitomised the American Dream. As a child growing up in Andhra Pradesh, he was pushed hard academically by his civil-servant father, though not to the detriment of other interests - as demonstrated by the three posters he had up on his bedroom wall: the philosopher Karl Marx, the goddess Lakshmi and the stylish Hyderabadi batsman ML Jaisimha, whose 39-Test record never quite lived up to the purity of his cover drive.
And so, after a childhood spent balancing a love of cricket and computers, Nadella emerged in 1988 as a well-rounded graduate (and 1st XI offspinner) from Hyderabad Public School, and went on to apply for a place at the University of Wisconsin to study electrical engineering. At the age of 21, he was embarking on a journey into the unknown.
“He went to the United States right when Sachin Tendulkar started to play for India so he looked at it and said, wow, he missed the entire Sachin era of Indian cricket,” he said of his sudden uprooting from the passion of his childhood.
“But luckily enough, thanks to streaming, and video on demand, and sites like Cricinfo, he was able to follow his career. It was as if he was in India all through. I guessed that’s the power of modern technology.”
And now, here he was at Lord’s - on the face of it, an incongruous setting for the launch of his autobiography Hit Refresh, the story of how he rose through the ranks at Microsoft after joining the corporation in 1992, before, 22 years later, taking over the reins of a four-decade-old behemoth and setting it on a course to challenge once again the mobile-era sheriffs of Apple and Google.
But from the moment he was welcomed on stage with perhaps the most niche in-joke that has ever been uttered in a crowded room (“Please put your hands together for the only person in Silicon Valley who didn’t think a ‘googly’ was someone who worked in Mountain View”) to his referencing, later that same evening, of Don Bradman’s average in answer to a particularly stiff question on BBC’s Newsnight, it was clear that Nadella considers the sport of his heritage to be a vital frame of reference in an extraordinarily successful career.
“Sport was one place where he had realised you are, in fact, much more hardcore, and willing to drop anyone who’s not in form,” he said of his leadership style. “But also, you’ve got to know when to persist in that very crucial time, when it could make all the difference. It’s fascinating to watch that. It’s like trying to find a new No. 4 batsman - if you don’t give someone a long enough run, they’ll never make it. Or a spinner, who I have a lot of sympathy with - just because one batsman hits you for a couple of sixes, that means nothing. You’ve got to get them back.”(these are words of wisdom indeed since our two freshers to our Sri Lankan cricket team Dhananjaya de Silva and R. Silva should be persisted with although they fell like meek lambs to the wiles of the Indian bowlers.)
Three life lessons in particular emerged directly from Nadella’s days on the cricket field. First was the importance of competing at all times, no matter how daunting the opposition may be - something that was drummed into him by his PE teacher during a school’s match where he and his team-mates had allowed themselves to be intimidated by the stroke play of a visiting Australian batsman. “You play to compete!” he said. “You must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe.”
Then, in another match, Nadella looked on helplessly as a talented but self-destructive fast bowler dropped a catch on purpose to make a petty point about the captain’s tactics. “Our heads all went down in that moment,” he said. Individual brilliance - while vital for success - means nothing unless coupled to an overarching team ethic.
Like the majority of his South Asian brethren, Nadella is a cricket nut. And, as for the third indelible lesson, that one relates to Nadella’s own bowling.
“One day I was really struggling, bowling trash, being hit all over the park. So my captain, who could also bowl offspin, replaced me, took the wicket, then gave me the ball back,” he says.
“I always wondered why he did that, because I went on to get a bunch of wickets in that match. I feel he did it because he didn’t want to break my confidence, and I thought ‘What an enlightened leader.’ I think that’s true for any of us who lead organisations. We all have to make big calls, but you have to have that sensibility. One of the key things that makes people tick is confidence in themselves, and you don’t want to break that unnecessarily.”
Why any of this should be relevant to cricket is probably not immediately clear. But as Nadella himself points out: “If you look at any field - sport, healthcare, education, public sector, automobiles - every company in every industry is becoming a software company.
Whenever I watch cricket games, all the people in the dressing room doing the analysis all have laptops, and so we want to supply the tech that drives their success. I think if there’s anything you can be sure of, we will have more screens and more computers in our lives, not less,” concludes Nadella.
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