SAP Town Hall
SAP launched a new release of the Business Suite this week, and as a result there were a number of SAP executives in the US. After the launch in NYC, they made their way down to the Newtown Square offices, where they held a Town Hall meeting. It has been many years (in the opening remarks I learned that the last one was in 2005) since I’ve seen so many of our highest ranking executives together on campus, and it was great to be a part of that team spirit and energy at headquarters. The turnout was great, as you can see from the shot above. The ground floor (not shown here)...
Read MoreYour time is coming!
This morning when I woke up, I checked my Blackberry (as I often do) before beginning to pack my son’s lunch. Imagine the excitement when I came across this in my inbox! ______________________________________________ From: John B Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 5:45 PM To: Natalie H Subject: Fw: Support for the COO programs and Projects Your time is coming! ————————– Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld ______________________________________________ From: Erwin G To: John B Sent: Wed Jan 21 16:53:35...
Read MoreMeeting Ernie, learning Lean
One of the funny things about SAP is that we refer to our highest-ranking executives by their first names - Leo, Bill, Henning, Marty, Ernie, Hasso, Shai … Not that there aren’t other Germans at SAP named Henning! But when you just say ‘Henning’, everyone knows who you’re talking about. In my case, I’m really excited to tell you that (as part of SAP’s Top Talent program) I had the chance to have lunch and speak with Ernie in September last year, during his worldwide Listen & Learn Tour. There are a couple of reasons I didn’t write...
Read MoreTalent Management
In my dissertation research, I explored the different mechanisms of control at work within the corporate context. I took advantage of my insider access as a corporate employee to describe and analyze varied of business practices and deconstruct them from an anthropological point of view. I looked at everything from employee communications, to budgeting, to HR practices. For a theoretical framework I used the work of Foucault. Towards the end of his career, Foucault described a form of power he called ‘technologies of the self’, in which people self-manage because they have...
Read MoreWild & wooly
SAP, it seems, is in a constant state of re-organization. I wrote a whole chapter on the topic in my dissertation, which I completed in 2004. For reasons that I’ll get to in a minute, I re-read the chapter today and I feel that much of it still holds true, in spite of the fact that I wrote my dissertation during very dark moments in both the country and the company’s history - the dot-com crash and after 9/11. Changes were also underway in part because of the departure of the Americas’ CEO, and because the U.S. was making the transition to a regionally-focused selling...
Read MoreEPIC 2008
Over the years, it’s been harder and harder to find academic or industry conferences that I really enjoy and learn from. The American Anthropology Association has so much infighting, and SO little support for practicing anthropologists that I haven’t attended in a few years. I’ve even stopped my membership, because they have the gall to charge a sliding membership fee, knowing that practicing anthropologists probably earn more, but doing next to nothing to support us. Furthermore, the conference papers are typically not that strong, and the proceedings are not...
Read MoreEnterprise UI Summit – prework
Elsewhere, I’ve written about SAP’s intranet (called the Corporate Portal), which runs on the SAP NetWeaver platform. In addition to our intranet, at SAP we have an instance of the Jive Clearspace Suite installed for collaboration both inside and outside the firewall. I have enjoyed my use of the ‘Collaboration Workspace’ so far, though I do sometimes find it frustrating that it exists independent of the rest of our landscape; it makes it ‘above the flow’ rather than ‘in the flow’, as Michael Idinopulos said. Nonetheless, my experience...
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