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What Is Steve Ballmer's Leadership Model

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What Is Steve Ballmer's Leadership Model
Steve Ballmer vs Satya Nadella
Management Topics Identified : “ Leadership ” and “ Innovation and Change ”

Microsoft welcomed its third CEO Satya Nadella, who was a replacement for the former CEO Steve Ballmer, on February 4, 2014. The 48 – year - old Indian has managed the company in a very different manner as compared to how things worked when Ballmer was in charge. Both the leaders were excellent at their jobs which led Microsoft, of the IT industry, to be successful on various platforms. Ballmer made his share of mistakes while also leaving a foundation for the next CEO to work on.

“ Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality ”. This quote by Warren Bennis gives us a clear understanding on the true meaning of leadership.
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In his 14 – year – tenure, revenue increased from 25 billion dollars to 87 billion dollars in 2001 and 2014 respectively. Annual operating profit of the company grew from 11.7 billion dollars to 27.7 billion dollars. The net profit margin was a massive 32 percent during Ballmer’s last financial year which is considered a rare percentage that only a few large organizations achieve. He also launched the original Xbox and Xbox 360 which were highly successful in the market (Jones 2013). Xbox was one of Ballmer’s greatest …show more content…
Change which is driven by strategic vision, also known as a teleological change, took place in Microsoft after the new CEO stepped in. (Clegg, Kornberger & Pitsis 2011, pp. 464). There have been significant developments in the way the company now operates. In an interview with Dan Knight who was an editor for Strategy and Leadership, Clayton Christensen mentioned about Microsoft. He said the company has to concentrate more on developing their applications as it would be a major source of income in the future (Randall 2005). Relatively enough , the prediction turned out to be true. Microsoft now earns a considerable amount of money from a number of products as they focused on improving their apps and not only on their operating system. .

Under Ballmer, Microsoft was not developing fast enough. There was little innovation taking place. According to the Wall Street Journal, about 85 percent of the revenue is contributed by just two products: Office and Windows (Ovide, Rosenbush 2013). Satya Nadella’s goal is to eliminate any obstacles that come in the way of innovation. Not only did he want to bring in new ideas to Microsoft, but also wanted to do focus on the type of innovation unique to his company (Kimberly 2014). He initiated the innovation process which has advanced dramatically in order to cope with the new

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