I was delighted to see David Braun comment on my last post, which sparked a discussion between us about the use of visuals in our newly relaunched employee magazine at SAP. David is a photographer based in Las Vegas who has worked frequently for SAP, tirelessly capturing events like the annual customer event (SAPPHIRE), often held in David’s hometown. He also shot the cover photo for the second issue of our relaunched mag, which features an American colleague. (We aspire to portray employees from all over the world; our next covergirl is from Argentina).

When I first began working on the SAP employee magazine four years ago, we had one photographer whom we called whenever we needed photos to illustrate a story or an interview. He always asked, “What do you want, a portrait?” At that point, I honestly didn’t know what the choices were. He cultivated a war correpondent look, military style vest with lots of pockets, and his heavy equipment over his shoulder. But gradually we phased out his involvement. The art director at our agency grumbled that he submitted a DVD with 200 washed out shots, including all the ones that were out of focus, or where people had their eyes closed.  And I had calls from executive assistants and secretaries, gently indicating that his behavior was not always top drawer.

So we cast our net a little wider. We knew we needed better photographs, fewer headshots, and more dramaturgy to the layout. “More drama, baby,” as a local American TV celebrity says. We cast our net as far as Bangalore and Beijing, and discovered a number of wonderful photographers, all of whom I can highly recommend. To be fair, I only want to recommend one per region, or one in the regions where we most often need a photo shoot. Here is my final cut:

David Braun has covers the Las Vegas – Bay Area for us. SAP has a development lab in Palo Alto, and David has done a lot of work for us there. He is very professional, delivers on time, even under hectic circumstances, and best of all – has a great sense of humor!

 Carina Kircher, is based in the Heidelberg area and covers a lot of the local work we have – executive interviews, team pictures etc. She took the photo in my previous post of our relaunch cover. Her first assignment for SAP World was to cover the company football (soccer) tournament. I was delighted with the results. 

 Finally, while in India, I had the pleasure of working closely with Mallik of ideogram, whose business in Bangalore caters primarily to customers who want visuals for advertising campaigns. Mallik has a fine arts background that informs his work with a refined aesthetic. The quality of his work was exceptional. Look for his corporate work – including shots of SAP folks – on his website.

In advertising and publishing, the mantra is that design follow copy. Copy comes first. I would love to hear the thoughts of others on this age-old, thorny topic.

Last year began as an exciting year for us folks in the Corporate Publishing team at SAP. Our goal: to relaunch our media, including the employee magazine that I am responsible for, SAP World. I had spoken to a number of  independent consultants and solicited their opinions of SAP World and one remark stuck like a burr. The magazine was Teutonic and square, said that expert. SAP World was full of amateur photos and head shots. The features and interviews were long and turgid. 

But there was much that we did well and that we wanted to retain: profiles of people who work at SAP and have had interesting careers, executive interviews, features on software strategies, new products, work-life balance. We had even done a series of country specials on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), allowing two or even three editors (including myself) to travel from Bangalore to Beijing to witness firsthand SAP’s investment and involvement in the emerging markets.

Yet we were after better storytelling, better visuals, more digestible content. We identified agencies with credentials in the corporate publishing business, prepared a detailed brief, and opened the field to the pitch. The battle began. Our incumbent agency was among the companies invited to take part in the pitch, an agency that SAP had had on contract for its customer and employee magazines for 10 years. We saw brilliant work from these agencies, concepts for print publications and online platforms. In the end, our decision was based as much on these concepts as it was on a gut feeling, a feeling that we could imagine spending long periods of time with the agency’s team and could develop not only brilliant publications, but enjoy a close working relationship. We chose a small, Munich-based agency with a strong background in advertising, which almost spoiled their chances for some of the corporate publishing purists on the selection committee. Even their name is original: grasundsterne is a compound formed by joining syllables taken from the founders’ surnames. They gave me something I always wanted for SAP World: a cover concept that puts an individual SAP employee (or two or three) front and center. We had tried this before (see our India edition below) but their cover idea is repeatable, and never looks anything but simple, fresh, and startling. It captures the SAP demographic and expresses what we wanted the magazine to stand for: a youngish culture, techy but trendy.  This was our first cover after the relaunch:

This is SAP World before it got a makeover.  Our photographer in Bangalore captured the spirit of this young lady, a quality manager in the Enterprise Resource Planning team who also happens to sing classical Indian music in her spare time. I loved her on the cover, but when I see the old against the new, I can’t help but being mighty proud of our new magazine.

Finally. I have finally found the explanation for why I am incurably messy. It’s not genetic. It’s just because neatness, or Ordentlichkeit, is not one of my strengths. Makes me a bad match for a place like Deutschland then, where Ordnung muss sein, where the street is swept every Saturday, but never on Sundays or holidays. Where rules reign. In fact it might expain why I continue to be an observer, and not a fully fledged, card-carrying member of the society. I am just not ordnungsliebend. I discovered this Makel, this fleck on my character by doing a study of my strengths and talents. Focus, discipline – these are missing from my Strengths Finder results. And these traits would help a messy person.

Instead my strengths say a lot about why I love to read, write, talk, socialize etc. So here they are, my personal results of the Strengths Finder 2.0 survey, sponsored with thanks by SAP, the outcome of an online questionnaire that asks things like do you prefer to spend time with children or adults?:

• Ideation
• Input
• Activator
• Command
• Woo

My colleagues responded with mirth to the last one. Woo. What is that? The book by the same name as the survey and companion guide to the online test tells us that Woo stands for Winning Others Over. The meaning of the other themes is only really explained by the accompanying text. So buy the book, by #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Rath and discover your own strengths. I recommend it. It will give you a lift. Our entire team at SAP received copies of the book and did the test. It caused a ripple of excitement in the heady stress of our daily tasks. The idea is not to focus on what you can’t do, but what you do well. And then to team up with people who have complementary skills. Luckily there are two project managers on the team who have Focus and Discipline who have always provided structure to my Ideation and Input. I did find however, that many of my German colleagues found the test a load of crock. Nothing wissenschaftlich about it. In fact, the online reviews at Amazon’s German site give the book’s English version five stars, but only three and a half to the German version. This tells you more about the people reviewing than the book itself.

 I dedicate tonight to my excellent friend Lindsay, who is getting married at a castle near Dundee, Scotland. Long may she run. I dearly hope they play Neil Young at her reception party tonight. Lindsay was something like my mentor at SAP. Maybe not officially, but certainly responsible for sparking my baptism of fire. My first day at SAP I was greeted by two beautiful young women: One was Lindsay, the other was Simone. I wondered if all SAP employees were young and beautiful.

Lindsay and I spent our days talking and talking and talking. And writing. She is a great writer. Careful. Extremely meticulous. But a hilarious storyteller and most entertaining companion. She introduced me to the department, where we wrote speeches and newsletters and mails for one of the members of the executive board. She showed me the ropes. It was a real shame when she decided to leave. Kind of the end of an era. She had just gotten her company car, a smart little BMW. Many of the young women in the department drove BMWs, mostly of the 3 series. ”I can pass anything in that car,” I remember one of them saying one day.

I’m sorry I cannot be at Lindsay’s wedding tonight. I was honored and delighted to receive an invitation, and trouble to have to decline. But my brother Michael is visiting from Canada. I told LIndsay I would come to visit her in Scotland, with husband, sometime soon. And then we will celebrate. And talk, and talk, and talk.

Last week in Berlin at SAPPHIRE, I enjoyed the conversations I had with slightly unorthodox SAP customers like Ecotricity, an alternative energy company started by an ex-hippie who once powered all the mobile phones for the stage crew at the Glastonbury festival with wind energy. Ecotricity was a finalist in the SAP Quality Awards, an event at which I also had the good fortune to speak to the folks from the Spanish arm of Médecins Sans Frontières. The three Spanish members of their project team were the only presenters that day not wearing suits and ties. In fact, the black t-shirt that Ricardo wore sported such a brutally honest slogan that I had to ask him about it. “I am HIV positive,” it read. He explained that he worked on an awareness campaign in the border area between Uganda and Kenya, where there is a huge migrant population and where entire villages are wiped out by AIDS. “There are only children and grandparents,” he said. The interesting thing about both of these customers is that while they remain true to their values, of providing clean energy (Ecotricity) and saving lives (MSF), they want to improve and scale their business with SAP software. Hats off to them.

But then there was Berlin. Coming as I do from the provincial nest of Heidelberg, where the students are clean and shaven and study law or economics, and where my neighbors pluck the errant grass growing between the bricks in their driveways and terraces, I could finally visualize what the Germans mean by one of their most spot-on words – “spießig” – or white-bread and middle-class.

So I took advantage of being in a city where I have friends and stayed out late. Instead of going to the evening event on the program (the Zucchero concert on the last night of SAPPHIRE, explained to a visiting colleague as “light Italo-pop” by our PR guy), I went to Acud, a divey joint in Berlin-Mitte where my dear friend and fellow Canadian expatriate Robin Draganic plays a regular gig as bassist in a saxaphone trio. I was impressed at how well he and the drummer – whose bread and butter job is at the Friedrichspalast (a music hall and Berlin institution) – communicated with their instruments.  Instead of playing standards, they play their own compositions. Robin also introduced me to the Bebop Bar in Kreuzberg where he hosts a session every Sunday night. There is an astonishing amount of talent in Berlin and a lot of it shows up to play at the Bebop – twenty-year-old sax players, keyboard artists, singers, and drummers.

There is nothing spießig about Berlin. Quite the opposite. 20% unemployment. Before the wall came down it was always a safe haven for draft dodgers. This is the Germany I imagined before I came here – the one populated by Fassbinder characters in leather, artists all.

Mighty relieved I was when a tech blogger at SAPPHIRE told me that the first three months of his blogging experience were horrible. It took him three months to realize the difference between journalism and blogging – the latter in his words being “informed opinion.” My three months are not yet up but I have neglected my poor weblog sadly. I find there are very private things that I want to express in words, but not here. Which might lead me back to a diary, or to fiction writing. And then there are aspects of my job that I want to discuss here (for example, frustration with the performance feedback culture), but am afraid these will break our rules of conduct and our bloggers’s code. Yet that would be informed opinion. I welcome informed opinion on this quandry.

But this week I had an upskilled moment of my own. I received an e-mail from an American colleague in which she used the word “asks” as a noun: “Thanks to everyone for getting back to me on the asks of Bjorn for our upcoming event.” (All names have been changed to protect the innocent).

Only now, after several days, have I discovered that the writer didn’t even mean “needs” as I initially suspected. She means our requests of Bjorn’s time. Our “asks” of him. A friend of mine argues that American English is exciting because it is always alive and changing, is the open source of language – open to influences from music, politics, and now from new media. Of course, he is right. Although purists would reject such words out of hand, corporate-speak, as ugly as it can be, is always evolving and often exciting.

Time to express my thanks to two colleagues and one former colleague without whose interference this blog would never have been published.

First my thanks to former colleague Thomas Otter, who spent the better part of a morning with me in his last days at SAP talking posts, clouds, flickr, igoogle etc. Thomas was supposed to give me the Blogging for Beginners lesson, but instead I got Advanced Blogging. He is an avid supporter and we miss him at SAP. Thomas blogs irreverently on Chucks and lapel width at Dedicated Followers of Fashion and more seriously on technology at Vendorprisy.

Mike Prosceno took time to chat with me from New York about blogging several weeks ago. Mike is a social media expert, and is responsible for the topic within the company’s Global Communication’s department. His blog, Accidentally on Purpose, is a place where experts meet and exchange opinions and ideas.

Finally, I owe acknowledgements to James Farrar, whose blog Wisdom of Clouds, is a collection of penetrating and thoughtful essays on transparency and sustainability. James gave me some good advice about blogging in the bar of the Rey Juan Carlos hotel during SAP’S Field Kick-Off Meeting in Barcelona in January and has been pestering me to publish since then.

Thanks to all three blogfathers for their support!