Spooky stuff that helps explain a lot of the dysfunction flowing out from Microsoft.
I worked at MSFT between 2021 and 2023.
The Growth Mindset is very much just a gaslighting tool. To be honest I didn’t get the culty vibe from it while being on the inside, on the other hand no one ever tried to make me to read Satya’s stupid book (thankfully).
One important thing I just have to talk about is The Layoffs. If you ask me about “Growth Mindset”, or indeed if I ask around my former MSFT colleagues about the first thing that comes to their mind when they hear it, it will be that time when, not even a month after the massive 2023 layoffs where MSFT fired 11,000 people, we were told by management at a Townhall that it is time for us to “apply Growth Mindset and move forward”. I remember very clearly that they tried to spin it as if the layoffs were something that just “happened to us” and we had to move on, as if it was a hurricane that hit the office and not a deliberate act of management to cut costs. It was fucking amazing to hear that from them after I had a literal panic attack due to the uncertainty after the first wave of firings.
I made the decision to quit not long after. When I was leaving the genAI brain rot was already in full swing. The stuff about autoplaging Connects is just a great affirmation of my decision, that company is fucked.
Yeah. The fixation on growth mindset may be relatively unique to Microsoft, but the role it fills in the organization is really common; it creates a fuzzy standard to justify management’s decisions while it obscures management’s responsibility for those decisions. It’s like managers realized that the Jack Welch rank-and-yank approach is absolutely terrible for morale, talent retention, and the general ability of the company to function over the mid- to long-term, but doing big layoffs is still a great way to make the numbers look better to meet shareholder growth expectations. So instead of having clear expectations that can be met or even relative rankings that can be measured there’s been a move towards subjective evaluations. That is probably the best way to gauge performance in a lot of areas, but that requires both that the manager doing the assessment know something about the work being done (your average MBA won’t) and that the organization not have incentives to abuse the power this gives them (which shareholder capitalism definitely does).
I swear to Christ that corporate America is only getting worse. The best thing that could happen to just about every major corporation would be aggressive antitrust action resulting in a breakup. All the FAANG companies would be a good start, along with every media company you could name.
“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.” Some corporations are criminal enterprises and should have their tax numbers revoked. Some corporate officers are criminals and should be prosecuted. Some are complicit in crimes against humanity or war crimes and should be internationally prosecuted.
In Satya Nadella’s Hit Refresh, he says that “growth mindset” is how he describes Microsoft’s emerging culture, and that “it’s about every individual, every one of us having that attitude — that mindset — of being able to overcome any constraint, stand up to any challenge, making it possible for us to grow and, thereby, for the company to grow.”
Strikes me as a poorly plagiarized Toyota Kata. Toyota Kata promises your org will be maximally adaptive but it sounds like Satya wanted to one-up that with “overcome any constraints”. Toyota emphasizes iterative improvements as way a to build up systems knowledge, but Satya seems to take an essentialist read on the matter to say it’s a “mindset”, like improvement is an ingredient instead of a process.
Excuse me, I need a lie down…
Edit: How open is this to abuse you may ask? Imagine yourself to be an evil person, such as a chickenshit conflict-averse MBA-holding manger. If you need to get rid of an employee, then feed their Connect form through the nondeterministic bullshit machine repeatedly until it gives you an excuse. It’s the perfect accountability sink + employee disposal. Employee argues? They’re failing to apply the growth mindset.
My wife, as a teacher and educational psychologist, is honestly shocked that Growth Mindset’s bullshit has moved out of education and into business; it’s been responsible for removing classes that are streamed by ability and replacing them with things like tormenting low-achieving students by telling them they can achieve if they just try harder, and torturing high-achieving students by making them into unpaid teacher aids instead of extending them.
You, gentle reader, may be more shocked and angry at her news that some schools are adopting Agile, where they spend several hours every two weeks in retrospectives and planning what they’ll teach for the following two week sprint, with no long term plan for the children.
Edit: “Here’s four links, have at them.”
- https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/content/blogs/the-danger-of-growth-mindset/
- https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/growth-mindset-dead (2015!)
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2023/12/18/its-not-their-mindset-thats-holding-children-back-at-school-study-finds/
- https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-misinterpreting-the-growth-mindset-why-were-doing-students-a-disservice/2017/06
