The day Satya Nadella became Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s chief executive officer, he invited several dozen vice presidents to breakfast and had a simple, calm admonition for them: “Can you step it up?” The engineer’s tone was a departure from the yelling and wild gesticulations favored by his salesman predecessor Steve Ballmer and the razor-sharp interrogations of co-founder Bill Gates. “He’s one of those people where you just hate to say no to the guy,” Jeff Teper, Microsoft’s head of corporate strategy, said of Nadella in an interview in March.