Satya Nadella on who his ‘boss’ is and what it means to be chairman of Microsoft

Earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was appointed as the chairman of Microsoft. Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 as an engineer and became CEO in 2014 and now chairman. It is for the first time since 2000 that the same person is holding both these positions in Microsoft. Now that Nadella is the chairman, who is his boss? In an interview with The Verge, Nadella revealed the answer to the question. On being asked who is boss is, the chairman of Microsoft replied, “If your boss is defined as the person who ultimately can hold you accountable, it’s the independent directors of the Microsoft board.”
Speaking more about his role as chairman of Microsoft, Nadella further mentioned that it was the lead independent director “who has full authority over all of the people who are part of the management, including me and my compensation and my performance.”
Nadella said that he thinks becoming chairman is the natural outgrowth of what he has been doing for the last seven years as CEO. “There’s no real change, quite frankly, around the rigour of corporate governance and who has truly got the hire and fire authority on the CEO. And that’s the independent directors of the Microsoft board,” he told The Verge.
He also said that the way he interprets any change — in him becoming chairman and CEO is that “how do we bring the management team and the board together around what is Microsoft’s purpose [and] strategy? How do we hold ourselves accountable as a team?”.
Microsoft under Nadella has grown at a rapid pace in the last few years. Earlier this week, Microsoft’s market capitalisation value touched a whopping $2 trillion. The only other US tech company to hit the $2 trillion mark was Apple in 2020.