I spent the weekend attending Firenze here on Microsoft Campus in Redmond. I can’t tell you much about the competition as the teams were working on real live business problems and came up with some pretty solid ideas – but I can tell you what I took away from the two days. Two things:
I asked a few students what they thought of Microsoft before and after the competition. Here’s what they told me
“I kinda thought Microsoft was this big, corporate organization just like any big corporate. But now I see a very different company….one that’s pretty cool. As a design student I love the buildings, the architecture and how you work here…it’s not what I expected”
“I thought you probably had to leave your personality at the door if you worked at Microsoft – you come in, put on your white shirt and do your work and then go home and play your guitar and live your other life. It turns out you can be yourself when you work at Microsoft.”
Although that’s not the aim of the competition, it was good to hear….and bad. Almost everyone I know who comes to Campus and spends time with people here goes away with a very positive impression of the company…even if they arrived with a less than positive view. The challenge for us is how to you bottle and scale that? It’s partly what this site is about but it’s hard. Damn hard.
The second thing I took away was based on a question that one of the students asked in the wrap-up session. We had 3 senior execs taking questions and they were asked
“can you follow your passion at Microsoft?”
I resisted the urge to stand up at that point and tell my story – talk about following your passion. I followed it 5000 miles and I still look around every day thinking it’s a dream. Seriously, 2 years ago during my career development discussion I’d said to my then boss I’d love to be telling the Microsoft story, every day. Here I am, 2 years later with exactly that job.
One of the execs pointed to Pradeep U.N. – the guy who puts Firenze together. Though the competition was great and I loved seeing perceptions of Microsoft change, the real story I took away is Pradeep’s story. He’ll refer to the 60+ volunteers from around Microsoft who have helped put the event together this year but without Pradeep it wouldn’t have happened.
Firenze is not his job – it’s his passion. He doesn’t get paid to do it and gives up a ton of personal time because this was his dream – to put together a competition that was inspired by Ponte Vecchio in Florence. A competition that would fuse together the skills of business, design and technology (hence BXT). He’s been doing it for 5 years now, traveling to the universities, coaxing people to get involved and securing a $20,000 prize fund – all because he had a dream and wanted to make it happen. It was great 2 days and a great reminder that even inside this big ‘ol corporation you can follow your passion and make stuff happen.
