{"text":[[{"start":8.7,"text":"Asha Sharma was not an avid gamer when she became head of Xbox, one of the world’s biggest gaming businesses, in February. This week she has had to resort to the sort of drastic actions that any new CEO must dread: sweeping lay-offs announced just months after taking on her first high-profile job."}],[{"start":26.9,"text":"The move to cut 3,200 jobs and shed a number of games studios caps a frantic first few months for the 37-year-old boss of Microsoft’s Xbox division, an empire that extends from the games console to hits like Call of Duty, Minecraft and Candy Crush."}],[{"start":44.05,"text":"Sharma was elevated from relative obscurity by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year to take on the job of fixing his company’s struggling gaming division despite her lack of previous experience. She is a rare female boss at the top of a tight-knit industry that has faced its share of misogyny accusations. Piers Harding-Rolls, a games industry analyst at Ampere Analysis, calls her appointment “a significant watershed moment”."}],[{"start":69.9,"text":"Sharma’s route to the top of the gaming world has been an unlikely one. It follows a tour through increasingly senior operational and technical roles at a number of tech companies, including Facebook (as it was then known) and delivery app Instacart."}],[{"start":84.65,"text":"A person at one company she worked at along the way questioned her level of commitment to those roles, given her tendency to hop jobs every three or four years, the typical time it takes for an executive’s personal stock awards to vest in the tech world. It is a trajectory that has left her an unknown quantity in an industry whose leaders tend to be long-serving. Her predecessor joined the Xbox team 25 years ago and was known to be an enthusiastic gamer. "}],[{"start":110.30000000000001,"text":"Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, developer of Fortnite, says he only met Sharma for the first time at the games industry’s annual bash in San Francisco in March. However, he was complimentary about her grasp of the sector. “It was clear Asha understands what’s working and what isn’t in our industry,” he says, adding that she is “super-smart and tells it like it is”."}],[{"start":132.05,"text":"Intellectual sharpness is the first thing mentioned by most people who have had dealings with Sharma, while “telling it like it is” has become part of a strategy to win over those who might otherwise doubt her understanding of Microsoft’s gaming business. That has included disclosing the division’s profit margin — a meagre 3 per cent — for the first time. "}],[{"start":152.95000000000002,"text":"Sharma has spelt out her cure for what ails the company in usually detailed public explanations: cut back Microsoft-owned studios producing mediocre content; refocus on the Xbox console, rather than streaming from the cloud; and seek to reverse layers of bureaucracy and technical complexity that have built up around the business."}],[{"start":173.65,"text":"Matt Ehrlichman, founder of Porch, an online home services marketplace where Sharma worked early in her career and rose to become chief operating officer, calls her “an operator through and through”. Her “intellectual horsepower” and an aptitude for “learning most anything quickly” left her well suited to hopping between different industries, he said."}],[{"start":194.9,"text":"Born in Racine, Wisconsin, and a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, Sharma has developed a style that one person who works with her calls “very analytical”. Another says she “starts with first principles” in stripping down problems to their root causes. Her appetite for devouring information on complex technical issues has been compared to that of Nadella, who lifted her from a previous role as head of product in CoreAI, one of the company’s central engineering divisions."}],[{"start":225.45000000000002,"text":"Sharma, who has three young children, also holds a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo, something she says helps her with mental clarity and the ambition to see things through. "}],[{"start":236.00000000000003,"text":"She is fluent in Silicon Valley executive speak, crediting Nadella with teaching her the lesson that “optimism is a renewable resource”. After subscribing to the “regret minimisation framework” — a concept for plotting out one’s future popularised by Jeff Bezos — Sharma says she has shifted to “maximising option value” when balancing family and work."}],[{"start":256.1,"text":"Perhaps inevitably, her recent elevation — she has said that no one was more surprised than she — has resulted in a level of public scrutiny that was initially heavy on scepticism. Her claim that she was an enthusiastic convert to gaming brought forensic scrutiny of her gamer profile — prompting her to fight it out with critics on X. "}],[{"start":276,"text":"But her efforts at Xbox have won early support from users. Despite her prior experience in AI, she killed an attempt by Microsoft to push its AI assistant, Copilot, into gaming and has promised not to allow “soulless AI slop”."}],[{"start":290.3,"text":"Her recent decisions on job cuts have, however, sent a shudder through the gaming world, says Harding-Rolls. “It’s unsettling for the industry as a whole,” he adds, though he still credits Sharma with making the right moves to stabilise the business."}],[{"start":303.2,"text":"“There is nothing that can prepare you for taking on a new role in a new industry, being a first-time CEO and having hundreds of millions of people having an opinion about you without even talking to you,” the new Xbox chief told Bloomberg Live earlier this year. As she pushes ahead with the messy business of trying to sort out Microsoft’s, that is something she will have to get used to."}],[{"start":331.1,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783745127_3435.mp3"}