Stress or Pressure?

This post is a verbatim reprint from a book I wrote with Marco Iansiti of Harvard Business School, One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making (Smile link). The original content was from a Microsoft internal blog post dated April 23, 2008. More context is available in the book (Google Books link). Posts were written for the Windows team but available to the whole company at the same time.

One of the things that is really important to me is making sure working on Windows and Windows Live is a low-stress job.  Stress is evil, in fact stress is defined as:

stress: strain felt by somebody: mental, emotional, or physical strain caused, e.g. by anxiety or overwork. It may cause such symptoms as raised blood pressure or depression.

The thing about stress is that it is both physical and emotional.  Stress is all about a loss of control (anxiety).  Loss of…