Monday, April 30, 2007
» The Post-Shai Era II | Enterprise Anti-matter | ZDNet.com
» The Post-Shai Era II Enterprise Anti-matter ZDNet.com: "Finally, the reason that the post-Shai era promises to be a good one is that the company’s German-style management culture assiduously cultivated an extremely broad array of talent, and rewarded that talent even before they were ever asked to step up to the plate and fill in for Shai. This breadth of talent starts at the board level and permeates the culture of the company all the way down. Shai himself was particularly good at hiring smart, talented people whose job descriptions did not include sycophantic agreement with everything that that top management said or did – unlike some other companies and managers I could mention (unfortunately, you don’t know who you are.)
The result was a unique transition, one that SAP should get lots of credit for engineering: most companies would have suffered the loss of a charismatic leader with a visible vacuum at the top. At SAP, there was no sense of great loss, and while no one who stepped up to the plate is necessarily as charismatic as Shai, their respective abilities to articulate the message and further the strategic goals of the company speak volumes about what collective management – as opposed to the cults of personal initiative that American companies tend to cultivate – can do in easing transition and ensuring continuity. No a bad showing after all. "
The result was a unique transition, one that SAP should get lots of credit for engineering: most companies would have suffered the loss of a charismatic leader with a visible vacuum at the top. At SAP, there was no sense of great loss, and while no one who stepped up to the plate is necessarily as charismatic as Shai, their respective abilities to articulate the message and further the strategic goals of the company speak volumes about what collective management – as opposed to the cults of personal initiative that American companies tend to cultivate – can do in easing transition and ensuring continuity. No a bad showing after all. "
