The Mystery of the Miserable Employees: How to Win in the Winner-Take-All Economy

This article is adapted from the book “How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World,” to be published June 18 by St. Martin’s Press.

On the day I met Brett Ostrum, in a conference room in Redmond, Wash., he was wearing a black leather jacket and a neat goatee, and his laptop was covered with stickers that made it appear you could glimpse its electronic innards. That was logical enough, because those circuits were his responsibility: He was the corporate vice president at Microsoft in charge of the company’s computing devices, most notably Xbox and the Surface line of laptops and tablets.