SAP's personnel policy

Why. Why, how and where - there is plenty of room for speculation. Ultimately, these are internal decisions that are of no interest to us! The much more important question: What does this personnel policy of the Supervisory Board and SAP CEO Bill McDermott mean for the community?

We know that SAP Supervisory Board Chairman Professor Hasso Plattner and McDermott share a special relationship of trust: Plattner let McDermott have his way when he bullied former co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe; Plattner covered for McDermot after his accident and took his side; Plattner did not contradict McDermott when he dumped Bernd Leukert.

Naturally, it is the job of the chairman of the supervisory board to stand behind or in front of his CEO - but to the detriment of the company and the community?

The answer lies in the symbiosis of Plattner and McDermott: Plattner wants to see his former HPI student Jürgen Müller take the place of Chief Technology Officer (as was done previously with Shai Agassi and Vishal Sikka); McDermott "promotes" Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert to the place of Chief Service Officer Michael Kleinemeier, who was planning to retire at the end of this year; the very young Müller becomes Chief Technology Officer; in return, "Cloud First" head McDermott has to do without his experienced Cloud President Björn Goerke, who wanted to be Leukert's successor; Leukert becomes too dangerous for McDermott in his new position (Attention: There are some skeletons in the closet in Walldorf.Now Michael Kleinemeier has to extend his contract; cloud business board member Rob Enslin quickly announced the integration of SuccessFactots into SAP's ERP core, which had been years in the making, but then quit as well.

This time, however, there is a detailed obituary by Bill McDermott, who must now continue to drive his cloud strategy alone without the "cloud expertise" of Goerke and Enslin. A stringent and transparent personnel policy looks different, doesn't it?