The Polymaths have been making their way around the world.
a) This one made it to Leonardo Shikida in Brazil in good shape.
b) This one arrived to Harish Malani in India “severely jetlagged”. Barnes and Noble generously offered him a discount of a whopping $ 4 if he would keep the torn and soaked fellow!
c) The 5 below and 20 others traveled in my Delta baggage on my trip to Europe last week since amazon in the UK told me just before I left they could not deliver in Europe for another 3 weeks. To avoid the fate above from moisture in the cargo hold, they were packed in gallon freezer bags. They are now being well taken care of by Pat Phelan, David Terrar, Bertrand Duperrin and others in Dublin, London and Paris.
d) Of course, Martijn Linssen in Amsterdam had his arrive while I was there – because he had smartly ordered from amazon in the US, not amazon in Europe.
e) 14 of them barely made it across the state, forget the ocean. The USPS delivered back the cover (yes, just the cover) of a box. It had an ominous sticker “Received without contents. Jacksonville, FL NDC” so somewhere between Tampa and Jacksonville something bad happened to them. Or may be something good. On eBay, some used copies are selling for almost 3 times what amazon is selling them new!
Dear reader, do you have a Pilgrim’s Progress tale to report?
The New Polymath: The SAP version
I don’t like to play favorites across my books, but many readers say they really liked my 2010 book, The New Polymath.
The book bio read
“A Polymath—the Greek word for Renaissance Man—is one who excels in many disciplines. From Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin, we have relied on Polymaths to innovate and find creative solutions to the problems of the day. How would these Renaissance men and women manage our current technology bounty? Which disciplines would they choose to focus on? Would they work on the architecture of next-generation green cities, or focus on nanotechnology?
As our challenges have grown exponentially we need to bring together da Vinci, Franklin, and many more. The New Polymath is an enterprise that excels in multiple technologies—infotech, cleantech, healthtech, and other tech—and leverages multiple talent pools to create new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.”
I had a call with a SAP banking customer this week which took me back to the book:
“He: Vinnie, a lot of these terms I have discussed will be new to you. So happy to revisit and clarify if we need to.
Me: Believe me, as part of this project, I've gone from the auto industry and all the changes there (electrification, sharing, autonomy etc.) to healthcare to supply chains…
He: it's fascinating, is it not? SAP is at the center of it all.”
I could have told him about also learning about a dazzling array of new business models, carbon capture, cold chains. green hydrogen, molecular recycling, robotics in food service, reverse logistics, pharma track and trace and more. And the underlying tech it takes to support them including augmented reality, blockchain, computational chemistry, digital twins, not to mention hardened, high-reliability computing.
Over the last few weeks, SAP has allowed me to “walk the halls” with its executives, its customers and its partners. It has been demanding - not jet lag, but clock lag from Teams and Zoom sessions at all hours with folks in 20 countries so far - and trying to keep up with so much coverage SAP has across verticals, geographies and business processes. I replay the conversations as podcasts when I drive, I have nearly 2,000 pages of transcripts to mine.
Here we are in 2022 and we are worried about climate change, COVID and Ukraine. If you get away from all the political noise, our businesses are thankfully still focused on new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.
And the realization that we cannot do it alone. I heard a story about how a high-level auto executive came to visit Christian Klein, CEO of SAP as supply chains were being disrupted and told him “‘We have a couple of challenges in our business which I cannot solve alone and I don't think we can solve it with just one software company.’ That was the genesis of the auto industry network, Catena-X and since then SAP has been thinking about networks for many more industries.
“We cannot do it alone” is showing up in SAP’s rapidly changing ecosystem. Long dominated by SIs, I have talked to strategy firms, Industry 4.0 operational partners, startups in the SAP.iO Foundries accelerators. The ecosystem also has digital agencies, NGOs, outcome-based outsourcers and more.
Not every customer tells me “SAP is at the center of it all”. Many of them talk about S/4 or BRIM or hundreds of other SKUs in the product portfolio. But then you see the forest for the trees - what the broad SAP family is working on. It about so many edge applications – it’s not just about new medicine, new energy, new algorithms, it’s about new everything….
Demanding it has been, but as I felt when I wrote the book in 2010, most of these conversations make me go “wow” – and optimistic about the state of the world.
July 09, 2022 in Industry Commentary, The New Polymath | Permalink | Comments (0)