19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is credited with the quote ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger’. Since then, it has been used by many to inspire resilience and strength during adversity.
In the last few years, that resilience has been repeatedly tested by shock waves from large digital transformations, adapting to climate change, surviving COVID, and now navigating the Ukraine crisis. No industry or country has come through unscathed. Yet, like championship boxers, a breed of executives has learned to bounce back and keep on fighting.
In their dogged persistence, they are helping the world create new energy, new medicine, new mobility, new chemical formulations, new financial instruments, new ecosystems, new customer pathways, new business models.
Thanks to the sponsorship of Thomas Saueressig, Executive Board member, Product Engineering and Peter Maier, President of Industries and Customer Advisory at SAP, I have been part for the last several weeks of a magical tour of this ‘Business as Unusual’
We have talked to countless executives at SAP, at its customers and its partners. The conversations have covered over 25 industries and 20 countries and involve a changing business vocabulary with concepts like molecular recycling, green v blue hydrogen, decentralized energy markets, smart insurance, parametric testing in fabs, personalized medicine and outcome based contracts. The transcripts of the conversations already exceed 2,000 pages.
We are organizing the threads along a series of themes such as Sustainable Energy Transition, Everything as a Service and Future of Capital. You will be hearing lots more about them in the next few weeks.
You already know about S/4HANA and SAP’s cloud products like SuccessFactors. You will get to hear more about products like AIN, BRIM, e-Mobility, Fioneer, GreenToken and many others which are helping with innovation at the edge of enterprises in their labs, their EV fleets, their treasury, their warehouses.
Importantly you will hear in first-person from many of these ‘boxers’ who keep coming back for more.
Welcome to a New World.
