The One Word That Sums Up My First Few Weeks at SAP? ........Nevermind

?

September 24th 1991 was the day that the world changed for many of my generation: Nirvana released ‘Nevermind’.

Before that date the western world was full of hair metal bands that followed pretty much the same formula: tight spandex, back-combed hair, super-fast guitar solos, big power-ballads and huge stage shows. Many of these bands were entertaining but the genre had become tired and weary.

Then Nirvana arrived in the public eye with Nevermind. (Us cool kids were already following all the Subpop bands)

Nirvana didn’t look or sound like everyone else. They were a 3-piece, no big stage set, no makeup or big hair, and the singer even wore a cardigan.

Over the summer of 1991 I was working in New York City at a record label. I had a high-level job stuffing CDs into envelopes. In those days you could smoke in offices, so my friend and I sat in a smoke-filled room piled high with CDs, press releases, envelopes and sticky address labels, and listened to a pre-release cassette of 3 tracks from Nevermind over and over. We felt like we were in rock ‘n’ roll’s inner sanctum.

Not long after Nevermind released and became the phenomenon that it was, the folks in suits upstairs sent down the edict to the A&R teams to go and find another Nirvana. Of course, there wasn’t another Nirvana. And though our label did find a couple of good bands the ‘suits’ fundamentally misunderstood why Nirvana had been so successful. They were what was needed at the time: An antidote for formulaic hair metal pretension.

Now in my third week at SAP, I feel like I did in that office in NYC all those years ago (I stopped smoking in 1995). There is an excitement that I know something, that others have yet to discover, and that I will get to introduce them to.

?If I was to assemble my SAP mix-tape for you I would have a ton of great material to choose from: SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Industry Cloud, or RISE with SAP are all areas that we bring together to create the perfect customer specific offering. And just as music has moved on from the mix-tape to the playlist so has SAP: as business capabilities can be composed, integrated or orchestrated, assembled, disassembled and reassembled as business needs change.

But the one thing that has really stood out to me like those opening bars of Smells Like Teen Spirit is that SAP 2021 is not what you’d think (sure, we’re an ERP company but that is like saying Nirvana is just a rock band).

At SAP I've discovered that we don’t follow formulas. We don’t kowtow to convention. We create and we compose, and we are coolly understated as we do it.

Some of our competitors continue to be the stadium filling hair metal dudes. They continue to be somewhat successful. They get up on stage, make a lot of noise, are often fun to watch in an embarrassing sort of way, but are dining out on a hit record from years ago.

As someone who has seen what we are planning and what we are already delivering, I can’t wait to have our customers experience their moment of Nirvana (pun absolutely intended and I’m actually quite proud of myself for thinking of it J ).

I already feel as at home at SAP as I do in a plaid-shirt and ripped jeans.

?