From lonely holiday to SAP president | Hacker News Reader

From lonely holiday to SAP president

businessinsider.com

30 pointswallflower13 comments

The fact that lead positions in a software company are being filled by salespeople and PowerPoint/Excel 'wizards' says a lot about the company, doesn't it? Still remember attending Google's presentation during the 2015 SAP DKOM conference: "Who would like to see some awesome code of what we've done?" -- blank stares from the audience were the replies ...

/ disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this comment are my personal thoughts on the matter.

> The fact that lead positions in a software company are being filled by salespeople and PowerPoint/Excel 'wizards' says a lot about the company, doesn't it?

The lead position in a large company (in any industry) generally requires little in-depth knowledge of the product. The lead positions (CEO, CFO) are there to report to boards, shareholders, and regulators. Sure they might know and be interested in the product, but the CFO of MS and Apple generally isn't going to be a software engineer, just as the CFO of Audi or GM isn't going to be a mechanic.

"President of SAP Ariba" is not a CEO/CFO role in this case, it's a lead role in one of the more promising divisions. And I find it funny that you skipped 'CEO of MS' as an example, and started talking about CFOs instead, which are not relevant to this discussion since neither McDermott nor Atzberger are CFOs.

CEO roles might not strictly require a background in the space the business occupies, but sure as hell it helps knowing the difference between a widget and a bulboid, what you can realistically expect widget production to be, what widget consumers expects and so on - in other words, being a "widgeteer". The typical "masters of the universe" view that C-level executives are a separate caste of specialist dung-sellers is what gives modern capitalism a bad name.

But SAP is all about sales.

That isn't true at all, it's about a lot of things depending on the organization. It can be simultaneously "all about sales", or "all about marketing" or "all about software" or "all about verticals" or "all about data science" or "all about cloud" or "all about in memory databases"....

It's a huge company, it's all about a tremendous number of things depending on where your focus is.

Hmmm. I don't think you understand what an executive does. PowerPoint/Excel aren't useful as analytical tools. Their useful as communication tools.

Think of this way. Executives are like engineers whose IDE is PowerPoint/Excel, whose language of choice is human natural language, and who spend their time programming people, not machines.

You're too caught up on the PowerPoint aspect of this story. Most likely it was the guy's ability to persuade that was key. It's people programming, not machine programming that ultimately matters (until the Singularity at least - and then none of what we do matters).

"Naturally, Atzberger's career took off after that. He went to Japan and China, helping SAP grow in those markets, eventually becoming a senior VP in China."

Oh, come off it. I'm sure the guy did a great PowerPoint for his boss, but I'm equally sure he's an astute and motivated political operator, and no doubt he had some luck, too.

My TLDR was that the guy had a break by hitching up the person who would eventually become CEO. It could have been powerpoint, golf or birdspotting, the end result would have been the same. Moral of the story is "kiss corporate ass and you'll go places", which I guess has to be expected from such a publication.

Bullshit, in the sense that it's relation to truth is irrelevance.

Just a puff piece about how we should all put in face time.

I think there is a truth here about the importance of luck in making it to the top of the pyramid at a company. If you ask (almost) any top executive they will claim it is their ability/hard work. Very few are honest enough to describe the several points of good fortune they had along the way. Being the right person in the right place at the right time is a big factor.

I have worked at more than one company where some high up boss is very young. Then you discover they started with the company when it was starting out and have therefore risen as the high growth occurred. Sure they worked hard, had to learn and grow into the new roles. But the majority of people never luck into that kind of golden opportunity.

The biggest thing that happened in my entire career was luck. No question.

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" [1]

"Chance favors the prepared mind" [2]

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger (misattributed)

[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

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