Exponential: Transform Your Brand by Empowering Instead of Interrupting

6 The Why and How of Culture

At the end of one of the most dramatic time periods in business history, Kurt Eichenwald set out on an assignment for Vanity Fair to examine what he would eventually describe as Microsoft’s Lost Decade. He was investigating a company that had once been the world’s largest and most successful, but whose growth had hit a brick wall.

Apple, a company that had been largely irrelevant 10 years earlier, was now the leader in the music, mobile, and tablet categories, even though Microsoft had entered each of them earlier. Google had come out of nowhere to dominate search. Amazon had stepped up to own e-commerce. Microsoft was even losing ground in its bread-and-butter category of operating systems. Kurt arrived on the scene ...