Business Culture: from Know-it-all to Learn-it-all

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Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft , in his book "Hit Refresh" tells us how he rediscovered the soul of Microsoft and how the ability to learn and, above all, relearn was crucial to changing the mindset and corporate culture of this technological giant .

The book begins by recounting how the 2000s were a nightmare for Microsoft , which seemed to be losing its customers and falling into a true existential crisis. The emergence of Google and Apple had a negative impact on the growth of the software business , which until then had been legendary. In 2014, Nadella became the new CEO of Microsoft and announced that its new strategy would be to move from a know-it-all company to a learn-it-all company .

A winning corporate culture

A learn-it-all company decides every day that it kuwait whatsapp number database to learn, explore, and experiment to continue to win .
For Nadella, this involves asking three questions:

1. How successful are we in creating new products, services or business models?

2. How effective are we at adapting to new changes or disruptions?

3. Does our culture reward risk-taking, learning, and intelligent failure?

Regarding this last question, Nadella says that when people are encouraged to make mistakes, they typically have faster learning curves and develop more creative solutions.

But do organizations reward mistakes? Are they truly capable of taking risks? Or do they simply navigate at the whim of the competition?

In fact, to build a winning company culture we have to move from a “know it all” mindset to a “learn it all” mindset. One of the first (and bold) steps Nadella took was to change Microsoft ’s mission from the archaic “ a computer on every desk in every home ” to a much more customer-focused goal of “empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more . ”


"Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn. So the last part to me is the key, especially if you have had some initial success. It becomes even more critical that you have the learning 'bit' always switched on.”

Satya Nadella (Microsoft's CEO)


A question of mindset

The corporate culture presented by Nadella can (and should) be adopted by each of us. In fact, in the chapter "A Cultural Renaissance" , it is clear that one of the best capabilities someone can have is the intrinsic and personal desire to "learn everything" instead of "know everything".

In fact, what inspired Satya Nadella to look at Microsoft in a different way was Carol Dweck's book "Mindset ," which she was initially reading about raising her children. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University , argues in her book that people with a fixed mindset (the know-it-alls who believe that abilities are fixed) are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset (the learn-it-alls who believe that abilities can be developed).

Becoming a Learn-it-all

To become a learn-it-all , we need to be accustomed to making mistakes and failing along the way. We need to invent hypotheses and challenge them, putting them into practice. We need to unlearn what is no longer relevant in order to relearn what is truly needed at this moment.
Learn -it-alls know that there are no black and white answers to all of life’s questions. There are, in fact, many ways of looking at a problem, a decision or a situation . And just because the other person doesn’t see our perspective, doesn’t mean that they are wrong and we are right. It just means that we see the problem from different perspectives.
The most important thing is to be open-minded to other ways of thinking, ideas, concepts and points of view . Perhaps this is the biggest difference between knowing everything and learning everything.