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In our business, things look like a failure until they're not. It's pretty binary transitions.
Satya Nadella
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Success often appears as failure until it becomes evident, showing a clear transition between the two states.

Satya Nadella's quote emphasizes the often deceptive nature of business outcomes, where what initially seems like a failure may later reveal itself to be the precursor to success. The notion of a 'binary transition' suggests that these two states—failure and success—can be starkly different, yet the journey between them can be complex and non-linear.

Themes

BusinessFailureSuccessTransitionProcess

In practice

Example use cases

In a motivational speech to young entrepreneurs, you could use this quote to encourage them during difficult times.

More from Satya Nadella

If you don't have a real stake in the new, then just surviving on the old - even if it is about efficiency - I don't think is a long-term game.
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You look at marketing: everything that's happening in marketing is digitized. Everything that's happening in finance is digitized. So pretty much every industry, every function in every industry, has a huge element that's driven by information technology. It's no longer discrete.
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What matters is 'Have you done a better job of making our experiences feel like home on Windows?' That's our real goal, and that's what we're going to stay focused on.
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If you don't jump on the new, you don't survive.
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I want everyone inside of Microsoft to take that responsibility. This is not about top-line growth. This is not about bottom-line growth. This is about us individually having a growth mindset.
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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. 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.
Satya NadellaRead

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