“The way I measure my life is ‘Am I better than I was last year?’”

Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don’t learn.

Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.

One of the key things in the tech business in particular is that you need to be able to push boundaries.

Like anyone else, a lot of what I do and how I think has been shaped by my family and my overall life experience. Many who know me say I am also defined by my curiosity and thirst for learning. I buy more books than I can finish.

In the post-Snowden world, you need to enable others to build their own cloud and have mobility of applications.

If you are going to have a risk-taking culture, you can’t really look at every failure as a failure, you’ve got to be able to look at the failure as a learning opportunity.

I marvel every day at how people can excel – and that’s what really gets me going.

You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you’re successful, sometimes your not, but it’s the average that counts.

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.

The best work happens when you know that it’s not just work, but something that will improve other people’s lives.

Every time you think all the technology that had been created already, all you have to do is look around and then there’s someone new who’s born with a new idea.

A lot of people are joking about the Windows 10 error message that says ‘Something Happened’. Well, that’s not on me. My original idea was to not have any errors at all, and for the operating system to be called Windows RT ME One.

That’s the kind of person that I want to trust. That’s the kind of person that I want to really give more responsibility to.’

This is a software-powered world.

Our mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more is really a look back to the very creation of Microsoft.

Our industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation.