What I learned working for Steve Ballmer

Photo credit: Microsoft Sweden

A few months ago, I published a story called “What I Learned Working for Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.” As a follow-up, I want to relate a few stories about Steve Ballmer and the lessons I learned from him while working at Microsoft for a dozen years, beginning in 1998.

Lest I be accused of name dropping, let me be clear upfront. I was present at perhaps a hundred or so meetings with Ballmer, Gates, or both, but I was by no means in touch with either of them on a regular basis. I don’t intend to glorify my own role nor do I wish to imply “inner circle” standing. What I learned, I learned by watching them do.

Ballmer has gotten a bad rap recently and has been blamed for some of Microsoft’s missteps while he was at the helm. Few seem to give him credit for his many successes: almost quadrupling the company’s revenues (from US$20 billion to US$75 billion) even in the midst of an antitrust lawsuit, the construction of several multi-billion dollar businesses, not to mention delivery of 75 percent gross margins.

Ballmer was the peanut butter to Gates’ jelly, bringing business savvy to the technical battlefront. One without the other would never have been as successful as the combination of the two. For that, he deserves much credit.

I found him to be sincere to the extreme, passionate in everything he did, and loyal — almost to a fault. Ballmer was famous for emotional and over-the-top speeches, one of the most cited examples being his “Developers! Developers! Developers!” chant at a company meeting. His enthusiasm knew no bounds and his passion was contagious.

Ballmer the math whiz

The first story I want to relate about Ballmer is when we went in to see him as part of an acquisition we were doing. The process had been going on for several months and we were ready for a final go/no-go decision. We thought we had all the data ready and wanted a final decision.

I distinctly remember this meeting because it happened on September 11, 2001. I remember Ballmer walking in and sitting down. He seemed shaken by the World Trade Center attacks and made a few comments as we waited for others to arrive and then announced: “But we can’t afford to be distracted. The show must go on. Let’s proceed.”

So we started presenting our case, talking through the dozens of slides that we’d put together covering every topic from competitive pressures, product-market fit, revenue projections, to engineering team integration and more.

I did a large part of the presentation, and as I was speaking, I noticed that Ballmer started flipping through the spreadsheets that presented the target company’s sales forecasts, costs, profits, etc. Half a dozen pages in, he slowed down and started running his finger down the page. Then he looked up, waited for a pause in the presentation, and said in a soft voice: “This number is wrong.”

You could hear a pin drop in the room. I was floored and lost my entire train of thought in that instant. He had just scanned dozens of pages worth of numbers and instantly pinpointed a flaw in the math. I knew he was a math whiz but never saw this coming. Later, I heard from others that he had a habit of doing this in meetings.

I admit, in hindsight, to not having paid great attention to every single number. I was the engineering leader, and I’d trusted the finance guys to get the math right. In my zeal, I’d wanted the deal to happen, so I’d been happy with the nice numbers and didn’t question them enough.

We spent the next few minutes scratching our heads, mumbling, and re-working the math in real-time. He was right! There was a serious flaw in one of our formulas and no one else had noticed it. The deal didn’t make any sense once you corrected the math. We were done.

Any other executive would have assumed his finance people could write Excel formulas and delegated the task. But not Ballmer. That level of attention to detail was impressive, to say the least. The lesson I learned from Ballmer that day was simple: Every single detail matters. Trust, but verify.

A leader falls on his sword for his team

Loyalty vs knowing thine enemy