I first met Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, when he did a brief stint at Gartner in the late 90s. He was charismatic, showed good grooming and paid attention to whoever was in the room in an environment where analysts were not known to. His new book, Winners Dream, oozes of those qualities and you can see how he has been a successful sales executive in many settings. In his decade or so at SAP he also has benefitted from several other impressive executives around him. In my book, SAP Nation, I say:
As I reviewed decades of archives, I found myself admiring the architectural brilliance SAP co-founder Dr. Plattner has displayed over four decades. .…You have to respect the global enterprise that SAP ex- CEO Dr. Henning Kagermann helped establish. I have had a chance to watch the even more impressive work he has done after leaving SAP at acatech, the German National Academy of Science and Engineering, as I describe in Chapter 2. Even with his short tenures as CEO at SAP and at HP, you have to respect the enduring customer relationships Leo Apotheker helped build at SAP.
But all these executives failed in one major area – in corralling the massive ecosystem around SAP which keeps growing (by the book’s estimate it has cost SAP customers over $ 1 trillion since the recession) and has few checks and balances around it. You do have to wonder what more Bill could have done if he had been surrounded by solid operational executives
a) Imagine if someone like Tim Cook had worked his Apple supply chain magic on the SAP ecosystem. Or Tony Prophet or Jim Miller could have brought their HP and Google/Amazon operational experience to the data centers and networks in the SAP customer base.
b) Imagine if someone had driven service economics, SLAs and continuous improvements around the systems integrators and outsourcers like Gary Reiner did as CIO of GE. Or Scott Forstall did with the Apple iOS ecosystem
c) Imagine if some big thinking architects had brought shared, multi-tenancy efficiencies to the SAP customer base like Parker Harris at Salesforce.com or Stan Swete have at Workday.
Bill has an impressive resume. He will take it to new heights if he can deliver on the promise of “simplification” that the company’s new branding promises. He needs to dramatically collapse the $ 200+ bn a year burden on his customers.
To do so, he need only to be inspired by his own book. His winner’s dreams should be about building a dream team around himself – with different skillsets than SAP has groomed in the past..
