This article was featured in WOOL. Last updated for Wipro.com on March 6, 2020. 

WOOL: Jennifer, congratulations on being named Co-CEO of SAP and we look forward to more great things! In your recent role as President of SAP’s Cloud Business Group, how did you leverage the position to create critical business innovations?

ENNIFER MORGAN Thank you - I'm very excited about the new role. As you may have seen, we recently acquired a company called Qualtrics, which is geared towards experience management. These days, we are all operating in an experience economy. If a company is unable to tap into and cater to customers at all levels, someone else quickly steps in to fill that (experience) gap. Companies like Uber and Lyft were born because of a gap between what service was available and what people wanted to receive. Several start-up led innovations are geared towards exploiting this experience gap, whether in a product or a service. Legacy companies are also integrating digital transformation by identifying and addressing this gap.

We are really excited about this new category (experience management) because it's going to allow us to combine operational data with experience data (of your employee, consumer, supplier, etc.) and distil not just what is happening but why it is happening. And I think companies that can leverage this kind of data in a proactive way will have a competitive advantage. I see merit in taking the best of what we have in terms of operational system and software enterprise and combining it with experience management or X-data, as we like to call it, to create a new way of seeing and running a business.

"Good corporate governance is about making sure that you are doing the right business in the right way. It's also about making sure that it is something not just talked about by a small group of people, but practiced ground up and that it becomes an ongoing process."

WOOL: Acquisitions are strategic, but integration takes time. As a leader, how are you transitioning on a cultural level, what does your to-do list look like, what are you most focused on?

JM Listening and understanding. I have just walked into a new role. My job is to step in and create an environment of trust and transparency so that people believe. If people don't want to tell you what they want, it is hard to understand what you need to fix, what you need to be doing, what you need to accelerate, what your opportunities for new ideas and innovation are. So establishing trust is critical. I'm also laser-focused on making sure that I'm getting up to speed quickly on the product and engineering side of the business. Obviously, I'm very familiar with the revenue side of the business and spend a lot of time with customers, but I want to ensure that I'm familiarizing myself with those other aspects of the business as well.

One of the things I'm going to be doing - in addition to spending a lot of in-person time with these teams - is actually leveraging Qualtrics to understand the experiences that our product and development teams are having across the business. I think this will help me have a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities ahead from a product perspective. And this, to me, is walking the talk on ensuring that we’re understanding the "what" that comes from having great O-data and the "why" that comes from having great X-data - and in this case, that means understanding the employee experience. It also ties into making sure everybody is heard, and it allows me and everyone else in the organization to have a much broader context. I think this aspect is important for all verticals of businesses and leaders in order for them to understand how products are perceived, have more empathy, collaborate better, and ultimately, think differently and more creatively.

WOOL: Qualtrics is an $8 billion acquisition. There is always pressure to quantify results, especially with such big-ticket investments. How best can you deliver short term results since building trust, identifying new areas of innovation and forging partnerships cannot keep pace with quarterly earnings?

JM Obviously. Absolutely. Any company reporting quarterly results has the pressure to make sure that you are delivering on the short-term whilst creating sustainable growth for the long-term. And you have to balance both. I have worked on the revenue side of the business, so I am used to delivering every quarter. I embody that sense of urgency and balance, which is particularly useful because in a large company, there are multiple things going on and it is easy to lose focus. A big part of my job is to make sure that people stay focused.

You have to show progress in the short term and evaluate whether you are getting where you need to be, whether you report earnings or not. For me, I think what is important right now is to keep bringing the voice of the customer to the development and operational teams. It's no secret that further strengthening that connection between the customer and the product and development teams will continue to bear fruit for us. And that means ensuring that we’re soliciting customer insights and feedback along the entire innovation journey.

"We are really excited about this new category (experience management) because it's going to allow us to combine operational data with experience data (of your employee, consumer, supplier, etc.) and distil not just what is happening but why it is happening. And I think companies that can leverage this kind of data in a proactive way will have a competitive advantage."

WOOL: You emphasize trust and transparency, but is it particularly difficult when you have a global network of supply chain? How do you ensure good corporate governance?

JM To be honest, I think it starts at the top. In a large company, you have to make sure that you set the terms at the top.

Good corporate governance is about making sure that you are doing the right business in the right way. It's also about making sure that it is something not just talked about by a small group of people, but practiced ground up and that it becomes an ongoing process. One of the things I've learned along my journey is that people watch everything leaders do. People listen to leaders. They watch their every move and every word. They listen to the tone. So leaders have an obligation and responsibility of making sure their behaviour has a positive impact every single day, not just in significant events. We talk a lot about great leadership, integrity, morals, and how ethics builds trust. Words are one thing, but people need to see your actions. People need to see how you show up.

When I started out, things were more scripted. There was a lot of formality around communication and how people spent time in the company. Today, we have the ability to connect with employees, customers and partners in-person as well as through online campaigns and social media. People are intuitive. They can figure out when somebody is being inauthentic. Also, leaders should be willing to be more vulnerable. When I say vulnerable, I don't mean weak. I mean they should be open to learning and changing. This fosters followership. It fosters trust.

WOOL: While we are speaking of leadership, you have been credited with bridging the pay gap at SAP. I am curious what it took to drive this scale of change, which is so rare?

JM One of the biggest lessons I've learned as a leader is that sometimes the only way to see through uncertainty is to lean into it. Whenever a business looks at an issue like pay equity, there's an embedded element of uncertainty - you don't know what you're going to find and there's always a risk in that. A leader must take a stand on issues or topics that others remain nervous about. For me, closing the gender pay gap at SAP was part of my agenda of building a different type of culture than what existed and I was led by passion.

I've always believed in building a culture of transparency, and embarking on this initiative meant answering the tough questions and identifying a positive path forward. We worked with a firm to examine pay levels for all our employees and took into account several factors such as experience, performance, and employee location. It was a critical moment for our company because we truly didn't know what the outcome would be. I had assumed that the inequity would be around women and it was more concentrated around women but surprisingly, 30% inequities also existed among male peers. That, to me, was eye-opening.

"There's one thing that's really critical to being a good leader though, and that’s wisdom. Wisdom comes from a combination of time and experience. So on the podcast (A Call to Lead), one of the things that I really wanted to do was bring in leaders from diverse backgrounds to provide their wisdom and share their experiences in an authentic way, so that their triumphs, trials and mistakes become a learning, an inflection point for younger leaders."

WOOL: Is it tough to mould yourself and step into the shoes of a start-up firm ever so often because while SAP is a legacy company, you are constantly providing solutions for small and medium firms and their culture? Their budgets are very different.

JM

1. 1If you think about history, we're a company that, for 45 years, has constantly reinvented ourselves for the journey ahead. In some ways we've taken the mindset that we have to constantly disrupt ourselves to stay relevant and stay ahead. So even for a company with nearly 100,000 employees, that's not terribly dissimilar from a mindset you'd see in a start-up or early stage technology company. This is where an outside-in approach is critical, especially when you are a large company. Large companies can become insular, so it is important to always be in tune with your customers, your partners and your employees.
2. We are also very fortunate to have learned and adapted from the ways of the companies we have acquired. We have "cross-pollinated" our resources so perhaps someone from the SAP team has been able to cross over and learn new skills and develop new ideas, and vice versa. I think this approach means we've always been able to get the best out of the companies we've acquired - whether it's their culture, their technology, and often most, their people
3. I also want to say that one of the things about SAP is, when we talk to companies about growth, about scaling their operations, about regulations and going global, etc., we don't just use technological buzzwords, we put it in the context of a business model; we put in the context of industry. Our language of business has always differentiated us, and in a way, allowed us to disrupt.

WOOL: At the moment, which are the industries most prime for disruption? Where do you see an obvious experience gap?

JM We're seeing disruption across every industry - no industry is immune. But that, for SAP, is exciting. And the reason is that one of SAP's core strengths has always been our deep industry knowledge and expertise. That's often what has set us apart, and that means our customers are looking to us to help guide them as they confront disruption and competition from both inside and outside of their industry.

Another area of interest is regulated industries and governments. Popular opinion might look at government as a laggard in terms of innovation and the shift to the cloud, but we're seeing some interesting trends from our government customers. Whether it’s state, local, or federal, they're thinking hard about how to connect with their citizens - and actually starting to model how a B2C customer would think about how to connect to a consumer. We also see interesting partnerships forming. I mean, today, every company, in a sense, is a technology company and that's evident when you look at the talent they're looking for and some of the digital business verticals they are creating. So the scope of technology is expanding far beyond supporting business functions - it's driving the business.

"An outside-in approach is critical, especially when you are a large company. Large companies can become insular, so it is important to always be in tune with your customers, your partners and your employees."

In an interview you said that you evolved into the leader that you are because you didn't take decisions based on temporary difficulties. Can you elaborate on how this has played out in your life?

JM Yes, sure. Sometimes, life lessons become visible to you in hindsight. When you look back, you realize how pivotal a moment it was.

An example of such a moment for me was when both my husband and I had successful careers and we had our first child. When it was time for me to go back to work, we didn't really have a plan around the daycare situation. At this time, my husband had the opportunity to take a sabbatical. It was early 2002 and the dotcom bubble had just burst and the consulting firm he was working at sent out a memo to all employees, saying it was offering six to twelve months sabbatical, with a certain percentage of pay and benefits. It was a way for the company to retain talent. When he told me about this, I knew that it was going to provide our family a perfect solution, but he was not ready to be a stay-at-home dad. And of course, I didn't want to push him, because I wanted it to be his decision. He came around eventually and it really worked out for us. We had another child, he created his own life through volunteering and coaching. But looking back, if somebody had said to us at the time that we were making the decision for the rest of our adult lives, we would have probably not taken the decision at all. But because it felt temporary, it was easy. And it led us to a completely different track. When you have a problem, you tend to think that the next decision you take will affect your life for the next 10 years. So I always say if you're going through a time of hardship or you're in the middle of immense change in your life, don’t take a decision that feels permanent.

I wanted to talk to you about A Call to Lead, the podcast you host in the midst of everything else that you do. How did that come about and what did you want to address through it?

JM I'm very passionate about the podcast. On a regular basis, I'm very fortunate that I can meet and spend time with so many different customers and leaders - all of whom come from different companies and backgrounds. If I think about what is so different today from when I was starting my career, it's this - today, people are going to be in positions of impact and leadership much earlier than I was; the next person who sits in my seat will likely be 10 years younger. The world is changing so fast. There's one thing that's really critical to being a good leader though, and that's wisdom. Wisdom comes from a combination of time and experience. So on the podcast (A Call to Lead), one of the things that I really wanted to do was bring in leaders from diverse backgrounds to provide their wisdom and share their experiences in an authentic way, so that their triumphs, trials and mistakes become a learning, an inflection point for younger leaders.