We ran Part 1 of the interview with Rob Enslin yesterday. Part 2 below continues with how he sees tech and its impact today compared to his perspective in past decades. He also talks about his leadership style and his mentors who have helped him grow over his career.
“I look at the tech industry in a couple of interesting ways. First, I think there's never been a time in the last 50 or 60 years where whatever you describe as information technology - the Internet, software – it’s really important for nations, and really important for global business in a significant way. I don't think we've ever seen the amount of regulators, the amount of time regulators in multiple countries around the world are spending on these topics today, whether it's Russia, China, the U.S., the European Union, the U.K. It's becoming a very, very important subject and obviously it's going to have a huge economic impact on the world as we move forward. So, it's a fascinating time in massive ways to be in the industry.
Secondly, the thing I think is really amazing is what we can do today with technology and with software, and the speed at which we can do it. You can't even look at the past five years without thinking about how software altered and changed business processes or how we can use technology to move things forward at a rapid pace. I think we will see more and more technology doing just incredible things, whether it's AI or ML, big data, and so on. These things existed in some form or shape in previous times, but they were really slow-moving areas, or we rarely used them. The pace of change in the 2000s was incredibly slow compared to the pace of change today.
Why is the pace of change and speed so important? Because, when you think about how companies are quickly moving all of the infrastructure into these cloud-based environments and then focusing all of their efforts on things that they could innovate for their company, it's almost impossible for one company to do what it did 20 years ago, 10 years ago.
There's a whole model of operation and collaboration that's taking place today in massive ways. I think that is really, really exciting for companies like SAP who have a big stake in the business applications market. I think that's true for multiple areas.
If I look at infrastructure and what's happened to infrastructure platforms, you start to see these mega cloud providers, what they're trying to do in the market, and the combination of services they provide. Why are they providing these services? One is, it's a lower cost. It's faster access. You get to use the latest and greatest innovations with its face recognition or natural language, which previously you had to go buy software to do so. It's at incredible speed and I think that's going to continue to move, so that makes it even more important.
You also see this at the security layer. There are four or five large security companies in the software industry, but there are thousands of innovators in the security industry. And so, platforms become really important in different layers: in the network layer, in the security layer, in the infrastructure layer.
I think the same is true in the business application layer. You know the companies that provide a platform with which you can build innovative solutions on top, and not only yourself, your partners, your customers. The world can create value on top of value – it’s the way that our industry is moving and moving at a rapid pace.
I think the winners in all of these aspects are going to be the ones that understand how to operate with competition, how to participate in frameworks with companies that you would perceive to have similar functionality to you, companies that you might be able to share different data models, different data environments, which in previous times, you wouldn't – all for the benefit of driving massive customer value faster and cheaper. I think that's the way the world is going in our industry.
Those that stand by themselves, stand alone. I don't think they will survive. I think they will be out-innovated. They will not be able to deliver at the speed at which the marketplace expects you to.
Now, having said all that, we also have to deal with regulation on top of all of these pieces. I think regulation is going to be part and parcel of our industry for many, many years to come, and we will have to deal with how we operate in these different marketplaces and how we meet the requirements for different governments and the European Union and different departments, if we really want to operate around the world. It's going to be a fascinating time to be in our industry.”
You are almost like a colleague to the Ariba leadership, the SuccessFactors leadership and so on. Talk a little bit about where you learned your leadership style and also about your own mentors within SAP and outside.
'My very first mentors that I had in South Africa were folks who I'd grown up with who had gone to work at IBM and had become really successful at IBM - my family. They helped me develop a strong work ethic. From a very early age, I was always taught that you have to work for everything. You put the hours in. So, that was kind of instilled in me. You have to know the details of everything. When you have details, you can make wiser decisions. And when you want to be really smart, you just have to learn, learn, and learn harder than the next. So, that's kind of how I approached pretty much everything.
The biggest learning experience for me in a massive way was when I came to the U.S. There was a gentleman at Coca-Cola who I worked with and I spent an inordinate amount of time designing how the system can function, how Coke should design it, and how I would do it. I had written basically written a white paper on this. It took me about three weeks to write this document. And then, when I handed it to him, and I started to explain it, he looked at it and said, "Can you take this document and put it on one page?" We went back and forth, and he took the document, and he read it. He came back, and he did a drawing of a house for me. He put the drawing in front of me and said, "Is this what you're trying to say?" I remember the drawing very clearly. And, I'm like, "That's exactly what I'm trying to say."
That diagram became the motto for everything we did, and I always remember the lesson I learned from him was to take things and simplify it so that everybody else can understand it because no one will ever understand your 28 pages, but they will understand the concept. I learned that lesson very early and I live it every day. I must say, "This is too complex," 100 times. Or, I'll say, you know, "The details are missing." It's kind of an oxymoron in a lot of ways, but that was one of the biggest lessons.
I learned a lot from people like Léo [Apotheker] in terms of how to deal with customers and from the founders of SAP on customer focus. I always remember Hasso Plattner in South Africa. I was amazed because it didn't seem like any other company had board members who visited customers. They would take us with into these meetings, so I learned a lot from them in terms of why it was important from customers, why the innovation came from customers, and how you connected with them.
Léo taught me quite a few things early on around being close to customers. SAP North America was structured in an industry model in the early 2000s. Léo wanted to go to a regional model because we were too far away from customers. And it really was true. Customers are local, and we had these industry reps flying all around North America spending very little time with their customers. I always remembered to put a focus on your customer and be local to customers. When you think about local, you think about the football teams, the churches they go to, the communities they share, the charities that they belong to, the volunteerism. Those are things that make you closer to your customer, not that you have necessarily the knowledge of the industry. It always stuck with me in a big way that you create a closeness and engagement with customers at that level.
And then, I learned from Bill [McDermott] really how to be bold, how to be brave, how to take on things that are much, much bigger than you, and to just keep stretching for it. When he came into SAP North America, he came with the idea that were going to double the revenue of SAP North America. And, I was like, "Oh, you've got to be kidding me. Who would have a strategy like that?" And, yet, we did it in a year. Always be bold, always go for it, always stretch for the moon.
I learned the most about managing from Japan. When you move into a marketplace, and you have zero understanding of the language, the culture is brand new for you, you don't know who in your team has been failing, you have to learn quickly. I removed a significant amount of my management team very early on, and I did that simply because I didn't know who was with me and who was against me. I felt that I needed a fresh team to tackle this, so I did something very unnatural. But then, also, I understood that you really have to understand the culture and work with the culture and help and respect their culture first before you try to make changes and live the way that the Japanese live.
I got to really understand how you can benefit from diversity in Japan. In this case, the diversity was me and the Japanese. And, rather than try to make the Japanese like me or the Japanese try to make me like them, we got to understand how both of our cultures could benefit Japan and how to motivate them.
I hired a Japanese woman to run communications and PR for me and everything I did in the first 18 months, she would critique me. After I finished speaking, she would say, "You said that. That means this. You did this. That's how they would perceive that." And so, I learned quickly how to communicate with Japanese media, with press, with customers, and how to respect certain things, what not to respect, where I could stretch the line, and so on.
I had a lot of guidance from her – she was an amazing part of my success in Japan. And, I remember all those management principles from Japan. This is where I learned that to be successful, I needed to make certain my management team was successful.
In a public forum, you'll very seldom see me chew out any of my management team. You will see me take a leadership position if I think the discussion or dialog is going in the wrong direction. I'll step out in front. But, if I think it's going phenomenally, I'll give them all of the bandwidth that they need to be successful, to be the star in the room, to show that they can lead because my belief is that the more leaders that you have, the more opportunities you have to grow your business, the more things you can do with your company and the greater that your company will be.
It’s a case of, if they've got the talent and they know how to thrive, give them the opportunities to flourish, and they'll go on and do great things. If not, your responsibility is to make the change quickly and put the right people in place. If you are constantly trying to be the leader, forget it. You'll never have a great company because no company, no business can survive on one leader. Everybody has to play a role. For me, that leadership is about seeing how great other people can create their careers."
