Greener, happier commute
This longish blog post describes how SAP could reduce it’s carbon footprint, while achieving the company’s goals of improved employee innovation, satisfaction, and productivity. Overview One of the gems in SAP’s current strategy is the company’s focus on sustainability. I have been working for SAP for over twelve years, and for the most part I find that there are not a lot of surprises – at least, not good ones! So when I first heard about SAP’s sustainability initiative, I was admittedly skeptical, assuming that it was part of the ongoing go-to-market...
Read MorePutting Lean in context
[NOTE: This post was originally titled Deconstructing Lean. I renamed Putting Lean in context on 3/26/09, because the post got so long I never got around to the deconstruction of the Lean concepts. That's coming in a future post, so stay tuned! Natalie] When I first conducted ethnographic research at SAP as part of my job, I was working in the U.S. Sales Operations. That organization’s priority was to establish systems and services to drive sales productivity. Simply measured, sales productivity is the amount of software license revenue per Account Executive (AE, or sales...
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...
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