And this is where, a couple of years before I had become CEO, I had read this book by Carol Dweck out of Stanford [University] called “Mindset,” which was more in relation to my kids. And the simple concept in that book, which I loved a lot, was it's better to be a learn-it-all even if the know-it-all has more innate capability, because the learn-it-all ultimately will do better. And I said, well, that applies to CEOs. That applies to companies made up of people. And I said: What if we introduce that as the meme to have the cultural dialogue at Microsoft?

Ever since adolescence, [my elder sister Anna] has been an enthusiastic admirer of the great Swedish writer, the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and she infected me so much with her enthusiasm that I decided to become a writer and describe Italian saga "à la Lagerlöf". But things were to take a different turn.

A book also pushed me to become a medical doctor. I was deeply inspired by Torao Tokuda, a physician who founded a hospital group in the 1970s that tried to revolutionize the Japanese medical care system.

Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, “how to” books seldom do any harm.

This was a co-educational school, with many progressive features. The emphasis was on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence, and any kind of interest in examination performance and grades was severely discouraged. ("She is quite a serious thinker," I remember one of my teachers telling me about a fellow student, "even though her grades are very good.") Since I was, I have to confess, a reasonably good student, I had to do my best to efface that stigma.

And yet, despite the high moral and ethical quality of social commiseration, political dedication and a deep commitment to equity, there was something rather disturbing about standard leftwing politics of that time: in particular, its scepticism of process-oriented political thinking, including democratic procedures that permit pluralism. The major institutions of democracy got no more credit than what could be portioned out to what was seen as "bourgeois democracy," on the deficiencies of which the critics were most vocal. The power of money in many democratic practices was rightly identified, but the alternatives – including the terrible abuses of non-oppositional politics – did not receive serious critical scrutiny.