After 5 years, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has transformed more than the stock price

Five years ago today, Satya Nadella took over as CEO at Microsoft, and by most any measure has been wildly successful. It’s common to look at the stock price as the defining metric of Nadella’s tenure, but the stock price triumph has followed something more fundamental and harder to measure: how he changed the culture of the entire organization.
Nadella’s term at Microsoft has paralleled my own here at TechCrunch. I started in April of 2014, and in one of my first posts, I wrote about the difficulty of substantive change inside an organization the size of Microsoft. In those early moments of both our tenures, I recognized a subtle shift was taking place, one toward service, something Microsoft hadn’t been known for under his predecessors Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.
Microsoft’s five-year stock price journey under Satya Nadella. Stock chart: Yahoo Finance