This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
In Theory
I love the process of winning, the process of preparing to win, of earning the right to win. You earn the right to win and you prepare to win when you deeply understand your customer. The things that are moving markets, the new generation disruptions and additional services and innovations that only you can bring because you deeply understand what the competition is doing. And you’re constantly looking around corners to do the next thing, the next best thing for your consumer or your customer.
And then everybody in the organization needs to know what to do. I’ve often believed that most things worth communicating in this world are almost always under communicated like the strategy of your company. The strategy should be simple. People should be able to recite it on the back of a napkin or talk about it over a cup of coffee. Everybody should be trained on why it matters not just to your business but the difference that you’re making in the world. Our most enduring cause is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. So this is the cause. The strategy for doing that is also equally important so everybody knows what their role in helping the world run better and improving people’s lives is. So we’re all friends in the pitch and we’re all driving to the same goal and the same destination. This requires immense preparation, immense dedication, great passion and hard work. It doesn’t come easy. I tell people simple is not easy. Simple is hard. That’s why it’s an art form to be simple.
In Practice
Simplicity is the most intractable CEO issue of our generation. If you think about the evolution of technology, the consumer has now brought all of their devices, their habits and their ideas as well as their likes into the office. So the consumer is now the worker in the enterprise. They expect the same experience in the enterprise on Monday morning as they had at home on Saturday afternoon. They’re going to be mobile, they’re going to be social, they’re going to absolutely expect all of the enterprise applications to be easy to use and beautiful. They want them fully integrated with their consumer applications. And this explosion of data and knowledge and information and people communicating in ways they never have before is causing immense complexity in the enterprise. So even though everything’s gotten better, people are smarter than ever and there’s more information and knowledge than ever, the enterprise has now taken a huge hit in the area of complexity.
Up to ten percent of company’s profits are tied up in complexity and they’re wasting and forfeiting the opportunity. So what we try to do is make it very simple for companies. We want to manage the data in an in-memory platform called HANA where you can manage structured and unstructured data. You can be social and mobile and all these feeds can go into a real time computing platform that can manage your business globally. Only one database. And then the easiest consumption model in the enterprise is the Cloud because this can be provisioned to the user as a service and you can constantly innovate and give more and more services easier and easier to consume to all the users in the enterprise. This thereby streamlines processes quite dramatically. It cuts complexity. It cuts cost. It improves profits. But most importantly it unleashes the true potential of people. People in your enterprise and within enterprises. And that’s the new future I see, the business network. The idea of frictionless commerce in and between companies to radically simplify the way business is done throughout the world in every single industry and every single market segment. This is the dream. This is my dream. This is the winning dream.