McDermott loves underdogs – perhaps because, at one time, he was one.
Growing up in working-class Long Island – the first child of devoted (but financially strapped) young parents – McDermott wanted to make things better for his family. He started early, collecting odd jobs the way other kids collected baseball cards.
In high school, he worked three hourly-wage jobs before convincing the owner of the small deli where he stocked shelves to let him buy the business for a $7,000 loan. Under McDermott’s customer-centric care, the deli became so profitable that he repaid the loan ahead of schedule, shared his earnings with his family, and paid for his own college education. “If I have a dream,” said McDermott, “I will what I want to hap- pen. That’s how it has always been.” His dream is to encourage people in all walks of life to become masters of their own fate. That’s why he wrote Winners Dream: A Journey from Corner Store to Corner Office (Simon & Schuster, 2014). Although the book is an inspiring salesperson-to-CEO story, Winners Dream is also a blueprint for succeeding in business and life.
Selling as a Way of Moving Up “The number of sales executives rising to become
CEOs grows each year. A sales background provides an edge and offers a leadership platform that is per- fectly suited to an effective CEO,” said Bill McDermott after he became CEO of SAP. McDermott speaks from firsthand experience. Prior to joining SAP as CEO, he was head of worldwide sales at Siebel Systems. He spent the first 17 years of his career at Xerox, where he held numerous regional sales positions. He eventually led the company’s major account operations – at the time a $4 billion business unit.
When McDermott became SAP’s first non-European sole CEO, he invited the company’s most tenured developers to lunch. Sitting around a table at SAP’s Walldorf, Germany, headquarters, McDermott asked his guests a simple question: “What do you need from me?”
One answer stood out to McDermott: The seasoned technologists wanted their new chief to follow what- ever he believed to be the right strategy. “It did not matter to them where I lived or where I came from,” said McDermott, who spent the first 30 years of his career based in the United States. “What they cared about was that I knew where I wanted SAP to go and how to get us there.”
KISS
Six months into his new role, McDermott was deliver- ing. “We’re reinventing the company on the idea ‘Run simple,’” he said. “Our destiny is to make beautiful software that is easy to consume so SAP can help solve the world’s most sophisticated challenges.” For the effusive McDermott, “Run simple” is more
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