Everything remains better

On April 20 of this year, SAP announced that Co-CEO and Executive Board member Christian Klein (39) will assume the role of Chief Executive Officer (Executive Board Spokesperson) on his own. Co-CEO Jennifer Morgan (48) has mutually agreed with the SAP Supervisory Board to leave the company on April 30, 2020.

In just over a year, SAP has had to deal with the departure of numerous board members: Bernd Leukert, Robert Enslin, Bill McDermott, Stefan Ries and Michael Kleinemeier.

The associated reorganizations are far from complete when Jennifer Morgan leaves the company, not surprisingly, but at an unusual time.

The brilliant Christian Klein will be spokesman for the Executive Board and will have to work hard with his young team of fellow board members - Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig - as they all lack experience. Christian Klein has the ex-SAP Executive Board member and current SAP Supervisory Board member Gerd Oswald as a mentor - will that be enough?

In addition to the important personnel issue, there is also the question of Why do these upheavals and construction sites in the SAP Executive Board occur again and again? The driver and decision-maker in this coming and going is Hasso Plattner.

As a major shareholder, co-founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board, he has the administrative and moral right to guide his SAP through these personnel decisions. It is well known that Hasso Plattner is a friend of the American corporate and lifestyle culture, both privately and professionally.

His numerous residences in the USA are proof of this. But Plattner has also repeatedly shown a strong affinity for the USA when selecting top management for SAP:

These include former Chief Technology Officers Shai Agassi and Vishal Sikka, SuccessFactors founder Lars Dalgaard as well as Adaire Fox-Martin, Jennifer Morgan and, of course, Bill McDermott. (The disaster with the European Léo Apotheker has been reported on many times in E-3 Magazine).

SAP is a global IT company, but it is not an American corporation, it is a profoundly European company. It had been an open secret at SAP for over six months that Jennifer Morgan was on a steep career path to the top and that SAP would at best be a successful intermediate stage.

It was therefore a strategic mistake to immediately appoint another American woman to head SAP after the American Bill McDermott. Like Christian Klein, Jennifer Morgan is brilliant. But she never had a relationship with SAP like Klein, who grew up in the shadow of SAP headquarters in Walldorf.