In 2017, Sarah Bond’s boss, Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox Gaming, warned her that working in the industry would be very difficult.

Not just for the usual reasons that corporate America can be tough, but also because, as a Black woman in gaming—an industry with a reputation for its sometimes toxic culture, including misogyny, racism, and online harassment—she might not always feel welcome.

Sarah Bond (MBA 2006) turned to Spencer, her gaze direct, and said, “Phil, my aunt died yesterday. She was a colonel in the Army in the era of segregation. That was hard.”

He paused for a moment, she recalls, and then offered her the job.

In retrospect, Bond appreciates the warning, and she knows her longtime boss was just looking out for her. But as she speaks about the experience seven years later, in her bright office on the sprawling Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, walls covered in a rainbow of Xbox controllers, she wants to dig into Spencer’s warning. After all, she isn’t just working at Xbox—now she’s the company’s president. Yes, she faces inherent cultural challenges. She’s also facing business challenges, like how to increase market share and capture the changing video-game audience. Even so, she has no fear. “Let’s get real about hard,” she says. “Whenever I encounter something hard, I remind myself there is nothing that can be done to me that has not been done to my ancestors. I’ve only achieved what I’ve achieved because of all the people who came before.”

Bond, one of seven children, says that though she experienced her share of racism and misogyny as every Black woman has, she is grateful for all she experienced growing up.

She moved to London with her dad, Bruce Bond, who had taken a job as director of strategy with British Telecom, when she was 10. She attended British boarding schools before graduating from Yale as an economics major in 2001. After leaving the Ivy League, she accepted a position with consulting giant McKinsey in its San Francisco office, having turned down an offer from Goldman Sachs. Bond took a break from McKinsey in 2004 to get her MBA and then moved to the firm’s Seattle office in 2006, after relocating with her now-husband, Cory Toedebusch (MBA 2006). From there, she became the chief of staff to the CEO of T-Mobile in 2011 and senior vice president of emerging business by 2017, a period that saw the carrier grow from an underdog to one of the big-three American cell carriers.

All of this experience prepared Bond to take on the role she accepted last October: president of Xbox. It was a historic moment for the diversity of the gaming industry and one with great personal significance for Bond, who has spent years navigating boy’s clubs and being the only person of color in the room. “So I appreciated the warnings about the industry but that’s been my whole life,” she says.

While Bond, who is 45 years old, saw being a business executive like her father as a potential career path growing up, she remembers feeling a particular attraction, as she was applying to business school, to the idea of becoming a specific type of leader. “I became convinced that I would be a turnaround CEO. I got very specific that what I wanted to do was take something that seemed impossible and make it possible,” she says.

Xbox recently surpassed Windows to become the third-largest revenue earner of the company, according to reporting by technology website The Verge. While it may not seem to fit the bill of a company in need of turning around, Bond says there’s a lot of work to be done.

The company acquired gaming studio Activision Blizzard in late 2023, over the objections of regulators who had tried to block it. That’s thanks in part to Bond’s lead-witness testimony on Microsoft’s behalf. Since closing the deal, the company has implemented multiple rounds of layoffs and closed some smaller game studios. Then there’s slowing growth in both console sales and Xbox Game Pass, the company’s video-game streaming service, especially since the pandemic, when the video gaming business was booming.

And beyond the business metrics, there’s the challenge of trying to make the gaming industry more accepting and diverse. The specter of Gamergate, an online harassment campaign that began in 2014 and threatened diverse game creators, mostly women, still hangs over the industry. Toxic workplace cultures have been called out at game studios all over the world. Meanwhile, video games are more popular than ever, and players today are far more diverse than the game-makers.

The gaming industry is currently in a kind of arms race to change that homogeneity within the companies, to better match the customer base, says HBS professor Frances Frei. That’s partly out of financial necessity. More diverse teams tend to produce products that appeal to more diverse audiences. “The industry is on a steep upward trajectory,” Frei says. “The threat is to any company in the industry: If someone else is improving at a faster rate than me, even if I’m better than them today, I won’t be better than them tomorrow.” But as Frei knows firsthand—she has worked with Uber and Riot Games to help diversify company culture—fixing it will take courage. “I can tell you who’s going to win. That’s going to be the ones that resist their insular tendencies, like male gamers creating for male gamers, because that’s not the customer anymore.”

Bond is looking at these big issues with the same steely-eyed gaze she leveled at Spencer when he told her the job wouldn’t be a walk in the park. “Who else is going to do it?” she says she asked herself. “I can do it. I’m smart enough to do it. Driven enough to do it. I love Xbox. I have a support network. Why would I leave this for somebody else?” Ultimately, Bond decided that the gaming industry was the perfect place for her turnaround-executive mindset: “At one of the world’s largest gaming platforms, I can actually make real change.”

Sarah Bond has never had trouble saying the thing out loud that everyone else is thinking.

In 2001, while a senior at Yale, she was flown out to McKinsey’s San Francisco office for the final rounds of a job interview. About 20 other candidates were there, she says, and they all seemed petrified. The day was long, with case interviews, a group exercise, a multiple-choice test, and a personality assessment. During the test, Bond remembers the room was silent, filled only with the stressed scribblings of the other candidates at their individual desks. Bond looked up and asked out loud: “Does anybody else think it’s strange that they’re basically giving us an SAT test?”

No one responded.

Bond prepares to record the Super Gaming Update, a quarterly meeting for global gaming employees, at the Xbox studio in April.

Bond prepares to record the Super Gaming Update, a quarterly meeting for global gaming employees, at the Xbox studio in April.

Later, Bond was one of two people in the group who was offered a job. Today, she is still stating uncomfortable truths out loud. But now, Bond is often the one running the meetings and trying to get others to say what’s on their minds. One of the roles she sees for herself as a leader is to allow others to feel they’re able to say the hard things, too.

Bond’s husband, Toedebusch, who met her during their first year at HBS, says her way of listening and problem-solving has always stood out. “She’s super empathetic and can understand what people are saying but really homes in on what they’re feeling or thinking—the unsaid. What are their motivations? What are they worried about? What are they trying to accomplish? She’s always been very good at that.”

Anyone who works with Bond notices this communication style. Before Xbox vice president of business development Lori Wright met Bond in person, she was impressed by her résumé. “All I knew was based on her LinkedIn profile, and I thought, ‘Wow, what an accomplished human being,’ ” she says. But when Wright walked into the room, she and Bond instantly connected on a personal level. Wright loved the blouse Bond was wearing, and they ended up talking about how Bond found it at a market in Southeast Asia. “We went and grabbed lunch together. And we talked about our backgrounds and how we grew up and our family histories.” Bond’s authenticity made Wright feel comfortable sharing things about herself and her motivations.

Bond oversees teams focused on hardware and software, business development, business operations, marketing, and strategy. Getting those various individuals, each with their own expertise, to speak to each other comfortably is a necessity. “The inherent training and the day-to-day lives of people inside of each of those verticals are very distinct, so unless you force the conversation across them, you won’t get as good a result,” she says.

But that doesn’t mean endless meetings just to have meetings, a challenge at a company that has occasionally weighed itself down with bureaucracy. Bond wants problems solved, issues aired, and conversations happening that matter in the moment.

After Xbox completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer (center) announced a new leadership structure, with Matt Booty (left) the president of game content and studios and Bond (right) the president of Xbox.

One of the biggest business problems she wants to address is the fact that the Xbox console has been number three in console sales for years. “The last console we built was, by many measures, the best console of that generation,” she says. “But that didn’t change our market position.” Bond wants her team to realize greater success and says that starts by helping them all imagine a different way forward. “I get to help people see that whatever paradigm they think they’re living in isn’t true—that you can bend solid steel.”

Answers to these tough questions, like how to shift a market position, can’t come from on high, she says. They come from teamwork. “And what I mean by teamwork is actually integrated diversity of thought across many domains.” An engineer may see one answer, a business executive another, a marketer or lawyer still others, she explains. “But if you can hold all those disciplines equal in your mind and create a space where everyone from all those disciplines can come together, and all things have equal value, you can unlock things. When people think something’s impossible, it’s because they’re looking from one angle, and they just need to turn it.”

Her direct communication style has worked for all kinds of problems faced in business, from a technical issue to an interpersonal one. When she joined Microsoft in 2017, Bond noticed a colleague had a pattern. “Whenever I would say something in meetings, they would say that it didn’t make sense, or it wasn’t a good idea. But when other people said something in meetings, they said they thought it was a good idea.”

Bond didn’t gripe or become disheartened. Instead, she booked a one-on-one on the colleague’s calendar and talked it out. “I said, ‘Hey, I noticed that whenever I say something in a meeting, you say one of these three phrases, but when other people say things, you say positive phrases. I feel like the rate of my good ideas to bad ideas is probably the same as those people’s. So I’m just sort of curious, why you do that?”

“I became convinced that I would be a turnaround CEO. I got very specific that what I wanted to do was take something that seemed impossible and make it possible,” Bond says.

“I became convinced that I would be a turnaround CEO. I got very specific that what I wanted to do was take something that seemed impossible and make it possible,” Bond says.

The colleague was taken aback, and Bond told them she was only saying something because she felt safe enough to bring it up. And her hope was that speaking with openness from her own perspective and, “loving kindness in my heart,” created more inclusivity, rather than drama. Once a person is aware of the tendency, Bond says, they can adjust for it, which will allow more people to have space at the table. Wright has seen this play out regularly. “She surprises me almost every day in that way,” she says. “When something is said or done that does not feel respectful or culturally inclusive, she’ll be the first one that will pause the conversation and call it out.”

She also sees her communication style, even when uncomfortable, as a way to treat employees with humanity. When Xbox experienced layoffs last year, Bond insisted those who had just lost their jobs also be included in the all-hands meeting the following day. “They were our colleagues yesterday and this event happened to them as well as to the other people,” she says.

Bond works closely alongside Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios, and Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. As the sole woman and person of color in this trio, she sees part of her role as bringing her own perspective to them, and sometimes pointing out where their perspectives might be missing some information. Some have called this kind of communication “risky” behavior. Bond sees it as necessary, because she’s not just thinking about her own job when she does it. “If I think of the risk as about my loss or my reward, then sure it’s risky, but if the risk is for everyone who came before me and everyone who is coming after me, then the denominator is infinite and the math changes: It actually flips to an imperative.”

Gamers sample the product at the Gamescom trade fair in Cologne, Germany, in 2023. (Photo by Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

When Bond was offered a job at T-Mobile as the chief of staff to then-CEO Philipp Humm in 2011, she was four months pregnant with her first child.

But she took the opportunity because it felt like the learning opportunity of a lifetime: “I was very cognizant that McKinsey had taught me how to solve a problem but in a very narrow way.” At the consultancy you were presented with one project at a time and laser-focused on how to solve it. But to sit next to the CEO? She’d be able to learn all the other parts of the company that one project might affect, and she’d learn how to be a manager.

One week after she started, T-Mobile announced it would be acquired by AT&T. The Department of Justice sued to block the deal. Nine months later, AT&T walked away. T-Mobile had no financial plan as an independent company. Bond stayed on. Humm resigned. Bond stayed on. John Legere arrived as CEO, and Bond stayed on. The work was all-encompassing as the company emerged into a new life. The once-struggling wireless company with spotty coverage and no iPhones launched the “un-carrier” marketing strategy, acquired discount wireless provider MetroPCS, and became publicly traded in the United States.

Bond credits working through that turmoil at T-Mobile with teaching her that executives aren’t gods; they’re just people. “It was very demystifying for me,” she says. “There was nothing to say that I couldn’t one day be one of those people.” But every morning she had to say goodbye to her daughter; she hadn’t been at the company long enough to qualify for maternity leave. “When [my daughter] started to become aware that I left for work every day, that was super hard. Here’s this amazing, precious person, with her little pink pants. And she’s saying, ‘No, don’t go.’ And I remember really struggling with that.”

At first, like many working parents, Bond told herself she had to go to work so she could pay for the things her daughter needed. “And then I thought, no, that isn’t right, this isn’t a subsistence issue. I’m going because when I go into work every day, I don’t see anyone else who looks like me. If I don’t go, who is there? What does that mean for her world?”

Today, Bond’s two children are both in school and the work she’s doing at Xbox is shaping their future worlds. In a recent survey of Gen Z teens, around 30 percent list video games as their preferred entertainment, ahead of social media, television, and movies. And the vast majority of Gen Z and Gen Alpha gamers cite the social aspect of gaming as the most appealing part. In other words, games are often how younger generations interact with their peers.

Bond says this is what has always drawn her to video games. She came to gaming as a young person because her dad loved gaming: “When I’d come home from boarding school on Fridays, he’d always be waiting for me with a Hawaiian pizza and a video-game controller.” Even today, she loves games that allow her to connect with others, open her mind, and embrace other people’s skill sets.

Now she’s sharing that same tradition with her own children, who both love that Bond works for Xbox and play games with her and Toedebusch, Bond says, “after they’ve done their homework and brushed their teeth and picked up their rooms and fed their lizard.” And the couple have continued the mission of looking at their careers as building a better world for their children. As their kids were preparing to go back to school after COVID lockdowns, they made a decision as a family that Toedebusch would leave his job as a marketing director at Amazon and spend time as a stay-at-home parent so Bond could focus more intently on her job. Though Toedebusch enjoyed his work, he said it made the most sense for him to take the career break. “When you look at the workforce dynamics and who was leaving the workforce after COVID, we agreed that the world—and our children—would benefit more from Sarah remaining versus another white male working in tech.”

And Bond has already seen the impact of how more inclusive video games can build more diverse friendships and connections. “In an environment where I see so much strife and division, I think that’s just powerful and very needed,” she says. “And the beauty of [video games] is that they have the ability to change your point of view or open your aperture without your ever knowing that’s what they were doing. You’re just having fun.” The sheer number of young people playing video games makes getting those games right all the more important, for the culture in general, but also for the success of the Xbox business. Players gravitate toward the platforms that have the games they like and that appeal to them. That’s part of the reason Bond is so proud of being a part of launching the Developer Acceleration Program in 2023, which offers grants to smaller game developers from underrepresented backgrounds to make games for Xbox. The company has also spent billions in recent years acquiring game studios like Activision Blizzard, but also smaller, more boutique studios, in an attempt to corner the next big thing in gaming.

HBS professor Frei agrees that the power of video gaming is immense. “It’s certainly less risky to go be the CEO of Goldman Sachs than it is to go be the CEO of a gaming company when you’re a Black woman, because of the recent history of [doxxing] etc. Having said that, gamers are freaking sensational, and Goldman Sachs can never make us as happy as the gaming company can.”

It’s a risk Bond is ready for.

Her godmother used to tell her that “becoming is greater than being,” but recently Bond started to question that. “Actually, the truth is, there is no being; there is only becoming. We are in a constant state of change. So the goal is to make sure that you’re going in the right direction.” As every gamer knows, the path isn’t always clear but figuring it out is the fun part.

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