 From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering The Churchills 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at The Churchills. It's the ninth annual award celebration put on by The Churchills Club, and the theme is all about leadership this year, and we're really excited to have a very special guest, John W. Thompson, Chairman of Microsoft, Partner of Lightspeed Ventures. He's been around a long time. He's known and talked to a lot of leaders, so John, great to have you on. Nice to be here. Thank you very much for having us. So leadership is such an interesting topic, right? You go everything from West Point and trying to train young men to be leaders in a military situation to startups that start as some small company that had some interesting idea that grows to a huge corporate thing that's changing the world. I just, what are some of your thoughts as Silicon Valley's going through some hiccups right now, and when you look at- We are. Just a couple little ones. Well, maybe not looking at the stock market. I don't know when that thing's coming back down. But, you know, when you think about leaders, what are some things people maybe don't think about, and really more interestingly, how should people grow, or what do you look for in a board member when you're talking to some CEO of a hot rising company? Well, I think leadership is as much about your personality and the business that you choose to go run as anything else, and the skills and experiences that someone might need to run a business, a business the size of Microsoft, are fundamentally different than what you might need to run Rubrik, which is a company whose board I serve on. But that being said, leadership has some core principles that are critical, independent of the size of the company or organization you run. First of which is integrity. Second of which is focus. The third of which is follow through and execution. I mean, there are lots of things that fundamental leaders do and do well, and those who don't do well don't become our state leaders very long, that's for sure. It's interesting to look at Microsoft because three big personalities, obviously Bill got it started as a young kid. I mean, he was literally a kid in college. Then you had Steve Ballmer come in, completely different personality, and interesting for Bill to be willing to give up their reigns, and then some tough times at Microsoft, little bit stagnant, and then Satya came in and just has supercharged and really driven a huge transformation in a giant big company. What are some of the attributes when you look at those three as leaders and you've worked with them that make them so successful? Well, I think each of them brought something fundamentally different to the table when they were in the leadership role. In the case of Bill, he clearly was a visionary. He defined a point of view about the technology industry that had he not done that, we wouldn't be where we are in the world today. And so Bill's role was unique. In the case of Steve, the company had hit a significant bump in the road all around the antitrust activity. And candidly, it's my impression that Bill really didn't want to be involved in that, so he turned to Steve and says, tag, you're it. And Steve had a very fundamental view about execution. He was very much focused on execute, execute, execute. And if you look at the way the company performed, its revenues grew from roughly 10, 15 billion to almost $80 billion during his term as CEO. However, the stock did not perform very well. And so people weren't very happy with that. Ironically enough, Sacha comes in. Sacha had run the search business, had run the cloud business, had even run the enterprise software business. And so he had a very fundamental view about what he thought the company needed to do. And there were two issues. Issue number one was a strategy around cloud. And on the day of his announcement, he announced mobile-first, cloud-first are the strategies of Microsoft. And then he quickly, quickly made it clear that the number two issue for the company was about its culture. And while I am unbelievably fascinated by how much progress we've made on the product front, I'm even more encouraged by what has happened on the candidly, on the cultural front. So on the culture front, that's arguably a harder thing to impact, especially on a large global company with hundreds of thousand employees distributed all over the world. So what are some of the secrets to change culture of a big company like that? It's fundamental. It's about openness and honesty and candor. One of the things that happens here in the Valley often for some companies is when they do their quarterly or monthly employee all hands meetings, guess what? They screen and filter all of the questions. Well, we don't do that at Microsoft. Satya does not do that. He wants to be open and honest and candid with his employees about what's going on. My gosh, that's what real leaders do. And so I think what he has done is nothing that is unique, it's just consistent. He has been very, very consistent and predictable in his execution of openness, listening rather than talking all of the things that good leaders are able to do. It's funny, the one word you haven't said since we've been sitting here, you keep saying execution of focus, which I love, focus, executing to light the customer. You haven't said strategy one single time. You said vision but not strategy and it's interesting because I think a lot of people don't put enough emphasis on, it's just work. You just got to execute. Well, it's one thing to have a strategy but if you can't execute the strategy of what value is it. So I have always had a view in my roles as a leader that it's about focus and execution. Yes, you have to come up with a vision and yes, you have to create ideas that employees and partners and customers can become excited about. But ultimately, it's about execution day in and day out. 368 days a year, 365. All right, final question, I got a busy night. As you look at some leaders that you look up to, maybe not of this generation that you've been working with but maybe of a past generation, who are some of the folks that you look to for your inspiration on the leadership side? Well, I would have to say the first one was the former vice chairman at IBM who I was the chief of staff to many, many, many years ago. His name was Paul Rizzo. Paul was probably one of the most influential people in the company during that period of time but you'd never know it. He had a level of humility about himself. He had a level of openness and candor in his interaction with employees at all levels, up and down the line in a company of IBM size back in those days, it was two, 300,000 people big. And so he would be the first leader that comes to my mind as someone who was impactful on me. Another one would have been a guy who created Akamai. He is on the board of Oracle. I mean, he's an awesome, awesome friend of mine. He was the guy who ran the Americas and gave me my first really, really big job. And the fact that he was willing to give a guy like me a job like that was a pretty important move. George Conradie's is his name, by the way. And so those two people were very, very influential as leaders as I would look at them and try to determine whether or not, can I pattern myself after that or are there things that they do and say and execute that I should consider as I think about my evolving leadership? Right, so important to have people that you can look up to, learn from and to take care of you and help you along the way. Well John, thanks for spending some time. It's always great to sit down with you and continue your success. We'll hopefully see you next time, not too long from now. All right, here's John W. Thompson. I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Churchill's in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.