Thumbs-down to “Gladiator Strategy”? Try the Nadella philosophy instead

It’s called the Gladiator Strategy. 

The Swiss CEO of a shoe company stirred his espresso as he tried to convince me of his preferred way of working: “I think a battle of ideas is so important. It helps us fight things out, so the one idea left standing is the absolute best idea.” 

In Roman times, the best gladiators weren’t necessarily the best athletes or the strongest physical performers but the ones who knew how to entertain the crowds in the way the emperor loved. Whatever, whoever amused the emperor was given the thumbs-­up. The workplace parallel is perhaps obvious: People can “win” internal fights in those boardrooms by arguing for the ideas and perspectives that the boss already loves. So “fighting for the best idea” becomes a public way to endorse and validate the emperor’s —­ er, boss’s —­ opinions. 

I asked, “You believe that putting people and their ideas under extreme pressure will yield diamonds?”

“Yes!” he answered enthusiastically, as if I was finally understanding him. 

Some coffee spilled. 

I really didn’t want to burst his bubble, but I also knew that his beloved boardroom battles wouldn’t fix the innovation problem he wanted solved. 

While some people might respond well to ripping apart their colleague’s ideas in a meeting, this is usually not the best way to bring out the best in people, I told him. Most will feel psychologically unsafe, which means they will hold back their ideas and questions. Fights in boardrooms mean people won’t lean on each other; they won’t work together. So your business performance suffers. Because in the end, we’re talking about humans, not rocks, right? 

I paused. That was a big thing to drop. 

Would he ask about other options so we could find one that was better suited, or was he super-committed to converting me to his worldview? 

And then he said, “But Ray Dalio does it. Of Bridgewater.” 

Ugh. Hedge fund gazillionaire Ray Dalio. Dalio had given a legendary talk on “radical transparency” at a TED event. He also threatened legal action against a journalist who wrote a book about Bridgewater; so much for believing in radical transparency. 

I didn’t want to have that debate, so I quickly calculated and redirected. 

“A better example might be Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who, like Dalio, is a big fan of a Gladiator Strategy.” 

Steve Ballmer is a 6-foot-5-inch-­tall man with a booming voice. Animated, crazy, wild, zany, and freakouts were some words used in headlines to describe his legendary press events when he was CEO of Microsoft. He would shout, run, and dance onstage at events. And because tech is a tiny little universe, it wasn’t uncommon to hear many inside baseball stories about him that mirrored his external persona: throwing chairs, books, and coffee mugs at people in the office over the years. His boardroom fights to create a high-­performance team were legendary. Yes, people felt inspired to perform, but they were also scared of him. 

Under Ballmer’s leadership, Microsoft grew revenue and made healthy profits. However, the stock price stayed flat nearly the whole time he led the company. 

Then Satya Nadella showed up and took over as CEO. 

Nadella was as soft-­spoken as Ballmer was loud. And Nadella’s leadership philosophy couldn’t have been more different. He publicly shared that he wanted Microsoft to stop its know-­it-­all culture and step into a learn-­it-­all culture. His boardroom meetings were so vastly different that they weren’t talked about, whispered about, or gossiped about. What people would say was that Nadella encouraged rather than shamed. He listened rather than told. He didn’t believe in right and wrong answers. When I would run into people at SXSW or other tech conferences, they would joke about how vastly different it felt to work at Microsoft, like being at a different company. One said it was the difference between working for Attila the Hun and Mahatma Gandhi. 

I tracked what happened financially. 

• Revenues grew. 
• Profits grew. 
• The stock market rewarded Nadella’s leadership and the company with a 969% increase in stock price. By the top of 2024, Microsoft had become the world’s most valuable public company, claiming the crown that Apple had held for nearly a decade.

“It’s not just that the stock price grew. It’s what that stock price represents,” I told the Swiss CEO. 

Remember, ~80% of the stock market’s value is considered “intangible.” This means the things we can measure —­ like intellectual IP, buildings, furniture, and payroll cost —­ account for only ~20% of the stock value. That intangible metric captures what is happening within the company. It measures whether they are doing their best work, or not. 

So a flat stock price is the market saying: We believe the company’s value creation engine is the same as yesterday. 

We’ve all been a part of teams. Some brought out the best in us, and some diminished us. Yet the same word, team, is used in both circumstances. It’s worth digging deeper. 

• Sometimes, we call it a team when all we do is work next to each other. Each person’s contribution is simply added together to reach the final result. If person A contributed 2, person B contributed 5, and person C contributed 10, the total would be 17. Many of us work in this scenario: We each do our bit, and our bits add up. The collective gain is additive. 
• Next, we call it a team, but only because we have to. The work produced by the team is less than what any of the individuals know is possible. Despite everyone giving their best effort individually, the result of the collective always feels like missed potential. Using math, it’s as if every teammate gets hired for their contribution but performs less than they are capable of. Instead of 17, you get 10. We are collectively diminished. 
• Finally, we’re not just a team in name; we work toward one objective. We’re willing to play our position as we help the whole team play their best. What is produced as a team is much more than any individual can do independently. Each person’s contribution is raised by the collective. The math becomes exponential. Each party makes a specific contribution, but now it’s magnified. Mathematically, it becomes . . . 2 x 5 x 10. Or 100. We are exponentially raised. 

These scenarios —­ additive, diminished, or raised — ­ describe how the relational intangibles shape what we create. 

And fighting is central to how this plays out. 

There are many ways to fight —­ unhelpful and helpful. 

Unhelpful is when we see the other person as the issue. Fighting with each other never helps us figure out the issues. Fighting over right or wrong is domination. Fighting over resources is like a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos —­ a scramble to grab what’s there rather than face what’s missing or generate what’s needed. And not fighting at all? That’s just avoiding the topic, dodging the very conversation that helps us grow. 

We often think fights divide us —­ that disagreement proves we can’t get along or makes us cruel. But if we focus on learning instead of winning, fights can unite us. 

So the question isn’t whether to fight —­ it’s what the fight serves. 

And how we show up to it —­ as a combatant or a detective. Yet work rarely makes this distinction.

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