Not a Family Feud

My sister M. writes to say that she wants to read more personal stories in this blog. About the family. I gather she was bored by my last post and wants to hear more about us. And my eldest brother suggests that I blog on the fact that ours was an unusual family because we never fought. A friend of his, also a member of a big family, says that harmonious, non-fighting families are “really weird”. In her family, fights were the norm.

So we were weird. We did not have arguments or fist fights or brawls. At university I had a feminist friend whose rhetorical skills she had honed at her family’s dinner table, where political debate was the evening fare. We never had any of that. My father’s opinions and beliefs and proclivities ruled. We voted Liberal but were conservative in our values, attended separate schools, participated in community life, volunteered, were PTA and hospital board and church council presidents, went to church every Sunday morning, and (almost) never got into trouble with the law. There was never any alcohol in our house, which might have played a role. My mother still buys a single bottle of wine for a Christmas dinner. For 14 adults. Instead, we showed our aggression in small, mean ways. By turning the cold shoulder. By tugging the blanket off my sister on a cold night in a double bed.

This was the kind of household where bathroom reading included Dominic Savio, Teenage Saint and Jude the Obscure. My father subscribed to The Catholic Register and Writer’s Digest. It was because Dad dominated the dinner conversation that we didn’t have much to say. We were not encouraged to challenge his viewpoints. “Crazy notion,” was one of his favorite expressions. “Keep a Christian tongue in your head,” he would say if we spoke meanly about others. I want to say that he did not hold forth with monologues or lectures, but maybe my memory is unclear. What I do remember was how he tested what we were learning at school by conducting impromptu Latin and vocabulary quizzes.

Mom ran the household like a military camp. With 12 children, there was no other way. She did not countenance any backtalk. So essentially we were disciplined and were taught respect. Does that explain our non-confrontational attitudes? Do disciplined families bottle up their anger, rather than taking it out on each other? I am curious to hear responses from my siblings.

Photographers I Know, Love, and Recommend

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.

Relaunched: A New Employee Magazine

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.

 

No to November

When I started this blog, everyone who gave me advice on blogging agreed on one essential element to blogging success: never run out of topics and keep heaping logs on the fire. Least of my worries, I thought. It still is. I have a notebook full of ideas and scribbles for posts, but either haven’t found the time to keep heaping logs on the fire, or haven’t had the desire to burn down the house. At first my goal was to blog and post once a week, usually Sunday night. Then I reached a point where I thought, one post a month. Just one post a month. Come on, you can do it! And then November came and went without a single post. There is a good reason for it. I dislike November. If I had my way, there would be only 11 months a year. Both of my children were due to be born in November but I held out until December for both of them. And December I love. It has such a clear, wintry spirit.

Time to return to that notebook and dig out my scribbles…

Find Your Strengths

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.

If U Kinn Read This

Some months ago, I received this mail from my son:

Hi mom

the e-mail is priti long,

kinn you redet to my wenn you komm home

Tony

He would be horrified if he thought I was making fun of him. I am not, but had to ensure that I would not lose this brilliant bit of linguistics. Before asking for a translation, pretend you speak English but can’t read or write it, and that your tongue is heavily flavored with Tuetonic.