Unsung heroes
Everyone in this photo has gone on to do better things. Would that have been possible without the facilitation of unsung heroes?
The other week my buddy Vijay posted the above photo from 10 years ago. I remember that dinner well, among friends while at the same time putting then co-CEO SAP Jim Snabe through the meat grinder.
The background is important for any enterprise firm that wants to feel the pulse of its customers and critics and which remains important to this day.
At the time, I had this idea that SAP needed to reinvent its stodgy image and sold the idea of giving away a cartoon that encapsulated where SAP needed to think. The cartoon came from Hugh MacCloud, a long time buddy whose pithy epithets had already inspired Microsoft to do better at a time when it was in the proverbial shitter.
The then SAP Mentor wrangler Mark Finnern bought into the idea which was to give each mentor two copies of the cartoon. I added the idea of giving each then board member a copy.
Yeah - it was a PR stunt at the time but looking back and thinking about how the words in the cartoon ended applying to everyone’s lives I have to wonder whether we should take more notice of things that appear to be jokes.
But…none of that would have been possible unless our dinner facilitator Stacey Fish hadn’t busted her ass to make it happen. I haven’t spoken with Stacey for a long time but I have very fond memories of her making sure that I got to the people I needed to inside a business that carefully guards it’s top folk.
Thanks Stacey - continue to suck less. In the meantime, be more amazing rather than focusing on quality. It really does matter.
As an aside, everyone in that photo has gone on to do amazing and better things. Go ask them: John Appleby, Harald Reiter, Vijay, me and my best friend Jon Reed.