As a post-Ballmer world looms ahead, I take a moment to ponder the immense challenge that lies ahead for his successor.  I am reminded of something a colleague once told me, when I remarked on his sizable innovation budget, "Don't envy me. With cash comes expectations."  

It's true.  That's why baby startups (the ones that you've heard of, anyway) always seem to over-deliver, and lumbering enterprises often seem to disappoint.  Relative to baby startups, big companies have brand recognition, cash on the books, pools of talent, and partners clamoring to work with them.  They are the equivalent of the wealthy Anglo-Saxon male Etonite and Harvardian descended from the time of the Mayflower, outlandishly advantaged (though invisibly constrained in other ways).  Given these assets, moderate success usually carries the odor of failure.

Microsoft is wildly successful.  Not "was", but "is".  $100B+ in cash and current assets on the books, according to their last annual filing, $78B in revenue, $27B in operating income, $22B in net income.  

I'm sure they wish their stock price was higher and less volatile, but generally any sane person would conclude they're not going bankrupt any time soon.  They have Office, Windows, Surface, Xbox, and above all, a giant ogre's foot wedged into every nook and cranny of the enterprise, one that won't be soon unseated.

But shhhh watch out, they're comin' to storm the castle.  Who's they?  Everyone.  The enterprise is the next gold rush.  The last one, in the consumer space, will soon become saturated.  The reluctant enterprise who's been like a wallflower swaying on the sidelines will be lured into the dance.

Ballmer's successor will have to get Microsoft to dance.  This is the tough bit - how to be just arrogant enough.  Bold, swashbuckling and visionary on one hand, enough to get people to want to dance with you, while being warm-eyed, trustworthy and ready to learn, so the lady will come.  

It's the marker of great designers, strategists and leaders - the ability to be just arrogant enough.  Someone needs to hold the complete vision in his head, with the courage of his (or her) conviction as the market beats him down, the analysts call him a dunce, investments get thrown away, and whole divisions get fired..  That same person needs to be able to evolve that vision, humbly - with the input of his team, as the landscape shifts under his feet, in combinatorial iterations and learning through market tests and failures.

I don't envy Ballmer's successor.  It does sound like some fun though.

I saw this article in the Economist...  http://www.economist.com/news/business/21583592-businesspeople-would-be-better-if-they-did-less-and-thought-more-praise-laziness

...particularly this quote:  "Yet the biggest problem in the business world is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busy-ness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time: they talk of vergaderziekte, “meeting sickness”. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them.

Which of these banes of modern business life is worse remains open to debate. But what is clear is that office workers are on a treadmill of pointless activity. Managers allow meetings to drag on for hours. Workers generate e-mails because it requires little effort and no thought. An entire management industry exists to spin the treadmill ever faster."

And it occurred to me that the coordination of human activity is both at the center of our ills, and the potential source of massive gains - where the next golden age will come from.  All these activities - consensus-building meetings, alignment calls, opening salvos, small talk, closing transitions, live face-to-face sit-downs for projects, multiple email drafts, unwarranted cc-ing - most of them are not about communication.  Most are coordination costs related to relationship- and trust-building.  No wonder big companies move so slowly - all real risks are experienced at the individual level, and social and relationship risk is ever-present in very large groups and costly in effect.

If every person I interacted with was completely trustworthy, and I trusted completely every person I came into touch with, from both a competence and benevolence standpoint, I would either be dramatically more productive - or I would have dramatically more free time during each day.  To cook, to bicycle, to read, sleep in until I'm rested, maybe on a beach.  "For work, if you love that best.  For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure. For mumblety-peg if that's where your heart lies."

This is the cost of low levels of trust.  What are the answers?  I don't have them all but here are a sample:

• Surround yourself with people you trust (e.g. family, friends, close colleagues) and make them keep liking you and the situation enough to stay
• Figure out how to trust the people you're surrounded by (e.g. get to know them over drinks, meet their friends and family, learn about their background and context)
  
• Try to move away from people you fundamentally are unable to trust (e.g. change teams, quit your job)
• Become more trustworthy yourself (e.g. actively pursue integrity, internal consistency and high levels of empathy as values)
• Initiate trust-building protocols that accelerate the perception of you as trustworthy (e.g. empathy-driven actions without any benefit in return, blunt honest opening sequences in new relationships, showing that you trust them by taking a risk on them)
  

The reward - fewer calls, fewer meetings, more time in your day spent on work that requires judgment and creativity, more time spent doing the things you love with the people you love.