If you want to understand a company, you need to understand the culture. This is true for any company, Enron, GE, Apple or Microsoft.
You need to understand the company leaders because they set the tone for the organization. You need to understand the day to day behavior of the troops. You need to notice the things the company tries to do as well as the things they are unaware that they do.
There are several books on Microsoft's culture related to interviewing and their pursuit of the smartest people with puzzle interviews but I have yet to see a good book on the management culture and behaviors it engenders.
This article gives one a taste of Microsoft's culture, which is changing, albeit very slowly.
How Microsoft Is Learning to Love Online Advertising
MSN's Ms. Bradford Fought A Bias Toward Technology As Rivals Steamed Ahead 'These People Don't Like Me'
Wall Street Journal
November 16, 2006
For years, Microsoft's culture equated smarts with pure technical brainpower. The company's internal systems, from hiring to strategic planning, were structured around building and licensing software, notably Microsoft's core Windows and Office products, which are still responsible for most of its revenue and profit. Engineering talent gravitated toward those businesses. Most of Microsoft's sales efforts revolved around managing large corporate buyers of software.
When Joanne Bradford joined Microsoft Corp. in 2001 as head of online advertising sales, it quickly became clear to her that advertising was a lower life form at the software giant. Her direct boss called her ideas "stupid," she recalls. In one meeting in 2004, a representative of General Motors Corp. berated her for Microsoft's terrible service.
Ms. Bradford had run afoul of a Microsoft corporate culture that elevated technology above all else. The bias would soon haunt the company as it struggled to compete with Google Inc., a company that rose to prominence through the power of online advertising. For Microsoft, says company Vice President Yusuf Mehdi, "advertising was a bad word."
Ms. Bradford has been a catalyst for that change, although at times her brash style made her an ineffective evangelist for Web advertising. In a 2004 performance review, a colleague praised her leadership skills and her "deep knowledge" of advertisers. But it also described the "downward spiral" of relations with her peers that resulted in Ms. Bradford being "condescending and most of all cynical," according to a copy of the review. The reviewer called for "a new start" in Ms. Bradford's dealings with her bosses. She acknowledges these shortcomings.
That same year, after a company meeting, Ms. Bradford confided to her husband from a hotel in Atlanta that she didn't know what she was doing working for Microsoft. "These people don't like me," she recalls telling him.
Ms. Bradford sought to educate the company from the top. In late 2002, she escorted Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on a trip to visit advertisers including Hollywood movie studios and Toyota Motor Corp. On the plane, she gave him a 26-page paper on the state of the ad business. He burned through it in about 10 minutes and spent the rest of the flight firing off questions, some of which she says she couldn't answer. His data-oriented approach was a dramatic change from the media world she had recently left.
But she was gaining little headway with Microsoft's upper management. At that time, MSN was focused on competing with Time Warner Inc.'s America Online in the old-fashioned Internet access business. Both companies were caught off guard when consumers bypassed them by switching to high-speed broadband lines. MSN's subscriber revenues plummeted just as an upstart named Google came on the scene without a dial-up operation but with a growing advertising business.
As Ms. Bradford pushed her agenda, she sparked tensions with her boss, David Cole, the senior vice president in charge of MSN, and a veteran manager of Microsoft software projects. Mr. Cole brought to the table a healthy dose of traditional Microsoft thinking, say people who have worked with him. At MSN, Mr. Cole's focus was on shoring up the money-losing group and improving its services such as email and instant messaging.
Ms. Bradford battled Mr. Cole, who at times would pound his fist on the table and deride her proposals as "stupid," say several participants in their meetings, including Ms. Bradford. In a sign of protest in 2004, a group of MSN salespeople walked into a meeting with Mr. Cole wearing black T-shirts with "Where are the Ads?" emblazoned on the back.
