For people who know me a bit, and who know of my love for the design and usability of Apple, the CEO of Microsoft may come as a surprise. It has everything to do with his autobiography Hit Refresh, released a couple of years back and available in paperback. I picked up the book shortly before the lockdown at Schiphol Airport and now read it cover to cover. Nadella hit refresh for Microsoft. A company that had descended from innovation into internal politics, and from being a market leader to lagging behind. Turning the course of a behemoth like that, by changing its corporate culture, is quite an accomplishment. But simply being smart in business and computing is not unique. The reason why Nadella stands out to me, is his empathy. He shows how empathy coupled with new ideas can be truly transformative.
In Hit Refresh, Nadella writes about transformation
One that is taking place today inside me and inside of our company, driven by a sense of empathy and desire to empower others. But most important, its about the change coming in every life as we witness the most transformative wave of technology yet – one that will include artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing. It’s about how people, organisations, and societies can and must transform – hit refresh – in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas, relevance, and renewal. At the core, it’s about us humans and the unique quality we call empathy, which will become ever more valuable in a world where the torrent of technology will disrupt the status quo like never before.
Transformation is a buzzword in the technology sector. We prefer disruptive transformation above all. And new technology is surely disrupting the academic domain. Digital Humanities has been revolutionizing a field that some claim hasn’t seen significant change in what might be almost two centuries. Results like language & speech technology, cultural AI, advanced image & audio-video analysis, and many others, have started to penetrate far beyond the humanities into homes and businesses the world over. And like in any other field, there are people who embrace the disruption and those who abhor it.
I am undeniably a proponent of this transformation, and convinced that we haven’t even really started yet. I am also neither the world’s most empathic nor patient man. While I have been working at the very vanguard of this revolution, it is for me, personally, never going fast enough. But I need to learn Nadella’s sense of empathy. I need to learn that the transformation is already here, that it won’t go away, that I can push a little less hard, and focus more on the people that it affects. When I was appointed as director of the KNAW Humanities Cluster in Amsterdam in 2018, the board asked me to work with a business and leadership coach; an opportunity I gladly accepted. These discussions focused on soft skills and have helped me remain transformative, but in an empathic rather than disruptive style.
Looking at the transformation with empathy shows that it is neither about technology nor management. It is about empowering people to develop new ideas, study new data, and answer new questions. It is about providing young scholars the tools to renew fields like the arts, social sciences, humanities, and cultural heritage. To help them find new relevance for their work. And these fields may never have been more relevant than today. Technology alone, so far, has failed to truly deal with the heights and lows of human behavior in our digital world. Trolling, fake news, propaganda, the internet bubble, and many other developments are affecting the real world very much. More and more we come to understand that the answers to these questions are not the domain of software engineers, but the people that study our humanity.