A great deal has been written about Steve Jobs and Apple. Not nearly as much has been produced about Bill Gates and Microsoft, especially in the ten-year period that Dave Jaworski was at Microsoft. Microsoft was the company that drove the hardest and built the fastest. He was there during this rapid rise to the top. Dave kept meticulous notes and took lots of photos and documented the risks taken, the dreams shared, the lessons learned, the hopes realized, and the mistakes made. Many of the issues at the time are similar to issues confronting leaders in business today. All can learn from Microsoft’s past.

Dave also details several secrets—some only his family knows. Some of these secrets were known to only a handful of people within the company at a time when it went through its explosive growth period: like the secret recipe for Coca-Cola or Colonel Sanders’ chicken recipe, these secrets were literally changing the competitive landscape in the technology industry and were rewriting the business rules of the day. Understanding these secrets and the thinking behind them can provide strategic insights and advantages to professionals and their businesses. Better still, they can help them define their own secrets to accelerate them past competitors and over hurdles to success.