Fortune EIC: Microsoft is sexy under CEO Satya Nadella

On the cover of the newest Fortune 500 annual list is the one-and-only Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, with a profile on the work he's done transforming the company after succeeding Steve Ballmar in 2014. Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell spoke to Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi about the CEO's biggest impacts. "One of the big things Satya did for culture, which needed a massive transformation, was to change it from a know-it-all [culture] to a learn-it-all culture," she said.

For full episodes of Opening Bid, watch on our website or listen on your favorite podcast platform.

Video transcript

On the cover.

Microsoft is back on top.

Satya Nadella, longtime CEO uh Microsoft uh his photos on there 10 years as CEO and it's strange because I'm now at the point and I don't know if you feel like this way.

Um Alison, I it's hard for me to remember the Steve Bomber days.

Uh It's hard for me even more so to remember the Bill Gates, Bill Gates Day.

I think Microsoft, I think Satya Nadella and here's a company that got a slow moving asset under Steve Ballmer.

Uh He had to come in there and just improve the culture, but look what he's done since acquisitions.

Uh Now pivoting to A I, he's got copilot deals with open A I.

This is a completely transformed company under Satya.

Yeah, I never thought I would say that Microsoft could be sexy but it almost under Satya, I mean, under Ballmer, it was like deeply, he was entertaining the company itself, deeply boring and very know it all.

One of the big things Sata did for culture, which was, you know, needed a massive transformation was to change it from a know it all like we know everything we're gonna force our vision on the world to a learn it all culture and even Sata and our opening anecdote, you can see him doing this with a customer where he's just like asking questions and learning, learning, learning about why they're actually in the opening anecdote using Facebook's LLM instead of his for a certain component.

Um So I think that was a big cultural shift, but he's just made smart move after smart move with his acquisitions like github.

Um And the way he leads the engineering team is with that idea of like you are not the customer, you're serving the customer.

So find out what they want and build for them and don't force our products on them, let them shape what we're doing.

Um So he's really just transformed everything from how the company is thinking the products that they're producing.