Culture clash at SAP

May 17, 2007 from InfoWorld - “Agassi accumulates more and more power, hires thousands of developers in the United States and India, decentralizes product development into eight global centers of excellence, and ultimately gets put in charge of all SAP product development. Then the questions begin: Will greater speed jeopardize quality? Will SAP abandon its tried-and-true proprietary ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) language? Do customers even want all the new stuff?

The biggest questions were cultural, as it turns out. Germans, like Americans, are generally afraid these days of losing good jobs overseas. Plus, they feared the business impact of the "Americanization" of SAP, as Americans flooded into top management positions. They may have a point: SAP succeeded by giving the world a very German software model -- highly structured, with enforced standardization of business processes -- the discipline that global customers needed. Not exactly the chaotic entrepreneurial American way."

180 View – It seemed unlikely that an Israeli, Shai Agassi, could become the leader of the German SAP empire. He brought the innovation and Americanization that SAP seemed to need to compete in today’s market. But something happened along the way and he resigned from SAP on April 1, 2007. It’s not clear what happened, but it probably was a culture clash. It’s unlikely that we have heard the last of Agassi. Click here to learn a little about Shai.