Lead Through Anything: Harness Purpose, Vitality, and Agility to Thrive in the Face of Unrelenting Change

CHAPTER 4

The Power of Agility

When Steve Ballmer succeeded founder Bill Gates as Microsoft’s CEO, the company was nearing the peak of its initial technology ascendence. Through the domination of American desktops and fed by the dot-com technology boom, the company’s market capitalization hit $642 billion just nine months later, in September 2000. It would take 12 years for another company—Microsoft’s rival, Apple—to eclipse that mark.¹

Steve had reason for confidence in Microsoft’s dominance of the technology landscape at the time, given that Microsoft released its most successful version of Windows—Windows XP—on October 25, 2001.²

At the turn of the twenty-first century, desktop computers were coming into their own. In fact, purchasing a PC ...