More than six months after the handover with Phil Spencer, the management of XBOX by the new CEO Asha Sharma begins to show a clearly recognizable imprint and rather distant from that impressed by her predecessor. The well-known financial newspaper Wall Street Journal has now drawn up a long portrait of her, describing her as an extremely demanding manager, who works a lot, demands a lot from those around her and prefers to put bad news on the table instead of sweetening it.

To summarize her approach there is a phrase that she often repeats within the company, also pronounced during a meeting with the Minecraft team: "Clarity is kindness". The principle is simple: a company must be able to talk about what is not working with the same lucidity with which it celebrates what works. Since arriving at the top of XBOX, according to the newspaper, Sharma regularly recalls negative business results in internal meetings and memos, rather than trying to downplay them. Her belief is that companies are generally great at celebrating successes, but they should also be able to communicate uncomfortable realities to their employees.

Such a philosophy takes on particular weight in the historical moment that XBOX is going through, after years marked by massive acquisitions but also by studio closures, cancellations and mass layoffs. And the numbers reported by the newspaper explain well why the tone has changed: the division has about 14,000 people and generates around $23 billion a year, but revenues are declining and the profit margin stops at a measly 3%, while XBOX Game Pass has clearly missed internal projections. This is the picture Sharma found on her desk, and which led to the approximately 3,200 cuts announced in July.

The stated goal is to bring the margin to double-digit already during the current fiscal year, with Sharma and the other Microsoft top management convinced that the business can return to profitability in the next. To get there, the chosen path, as we already know, is to reduce the number of games produced and focus resources and investments on franchises considered more solid and with greater growth margins.

The newspaper also collected the testimonies of those who worked with her before her arrival at the top of XBOX. Stan Chudnovsky, her former manager at Meta, sums it up in two words: "Very intense". Chudnovsky explains that Asha works a lot and that she expects the same from those around her. It is therefore not a reputation built at Microsoft, but a trait that has accompanied her throughout her career. In particular, the period she spent in a startup called Porch is mentioned, when she was busy obtaining a leading partnership with the American chain Lowe's: in her early twenties, she would have multiplied her trips and collected night flights week after week in order to carry on the job.

The move to Facebook also tells a lot about her rise: according to Chudnovsky, she would have been one of the fastest promoted people in the company's history. She later served as chief operating officer of Instacart, before joining Microsoft. The common thread, according to her, has never been a precise goal: she says she doesn't know what she wants to become, and that she is rather interested in understanding what she is capable of.

Todd Howard offers a similar portrait of the manager. The head of Bethesda Game Studios describes her as particularly effective in clearly identifying problems and opportunities, without wasting time going around the subject.

The contrast with the image associated with Phil Spencer for years is evident. The previous head of XBOX had built much of his public reputation on his proximity to developers and players, to the point that he even happened to play during some meetings. Sharma, on the other hand, arrives with a profile much more linked to Silicon Valley and the world of technological products: before taking the reins of XBOX she had never worked in the video game industry, but her path shows that she has already been asked several times to transform and grow large-scale businesses.

Curiously, her arrival would not have been planned for some time: Satya Nadella would have proposed the position to her during a meeting at the end of 2025, and the proposal would have surprised Sharma herself. What convinced Microsoft's top management would have been above all the speed with which she had immersed herself in the field of artificial intelligence in the past despite having no previous experience, combined with her knowledge of businesses aimed at the general public. She herself said that she evaluated the proposal by reversing the question: not so much if she wanted to fill that role, but if she could really make a unique contribution. Her conclusion was that XBOX had excellent development skills, but that the business needed a more effective strategy. Hence the commitment to reorganize the division in the first hundred days and relaunch its departments in the following hundred.

Internally, however, the judgment on her style remains divided: if some of the employees live the season of layoffs with apprehension, another recognizes the new CEO for having really understood the situation and seriously wants to stabilize the business.

Now, more than six months after his inauguration, the differences compared to the Spencer era are beginning to take shape and find an explanation. Beyond individual decisions on games and strategy, Microsoft has put in charge an executive considered extremely demanding, results-oriented and convinced that you should communicate without beating around the bush even when the numbers are not good. As XBOX faces one of the most important transformations in its history, and on the eve of the very difficult launch of a new console that will have to overcome extremely demanding challenges, "Clarity is kindness" could really become the symbolic phrase of Sharma's management.