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.

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.

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…

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.

On the last day of school before the summer break my son celebrated by inviting his best friend to a backyard bonfire in which they reduced their notebooks from fourth grade to a pile of grey ash. After months of teeth gnashing, headaches, stomach aches, and hours spent procrastinating on homework, my son had finally completed perhaps the most difficult and important year in the German education system. Emotionally trying for parents, teachers, and pupils alike, the fourth grade is when ten year olds are stamped and streamed for their further education. My son made the grade and was promoted to Gymnasium. His first day in his new upper school is tomorrow. “Don’t even talk about it!” he says.

I wish he had had a teacher like Mrs Murphy, who taught my friend Nina’s boy in Toronto. I have never met Mrs Murphy, but she sounds like a teacher whose mission it is to motivate children, and make their learning experience a positive one. According to Nina, Mrs Murphy gives the children “leadership opportunities” and encourages them to act like leaders. Instead of telling them who the boss is and what the rules are, she gives them responsibility and ownership for their actions. (Sounds like a good corporate program for employees :-) ). She never got mad, but was “disappointed.” And since she took the children on outings and did African drumming sessions with them, it meant something when their teacher was disappointed. As Nina says, “She believed in them.” And they respected her for it.

Nina’s child, previously sick with chronic belly aches, blossomed in Mrs Murphy’s class. “He jumped out of bed every morning like a little squirrel,” Nina says. Mrs Murphy’s approach may sound touchy-feeling, but the point is, she motivated the children. And if there is one thing my son’s fourth grade teacher did right, it was to demotivate the children. She was stingy with praise. She gave homework every day so that the kids often spent at least one if not two hours at repetitive exercises. I appreciate that it is not easy to manage a group of 28 children, but yelling at them if they don’t listen or don’t pay attention can’t be the answer. And it wasn’t, because every day, the children talked and didn’t pay attention, and every day she yelled at them. Rather than promoting leadership, she promoted losership.

A good teacher can contribute so much to shaping a young person’s personality and future. I remember my favorite teachers so well – they were the ones who believed in me. They recognized talent and interests, and drew them out. I hope my son finds a teacher who believes in his brains and recognizes that he wants more than to memorize Latin vocabulary and chemical formulas; a teacher who instills passion, ambition, and independent thinking. But I am afraid that in the German system, most teachers want to plow through the curriculum and have little time to devote to the individuals in their classrooms.

Today I went back to work after three weeks of paid vacation. I can’t complain. I have worked at companies where employees were grudgingly assented two weeks off per year. I get 32 days paid vacation at SAP. It is one of the perks of living in Germany. But. On my last day at work I left the office at 7:00 PM after an 11 hour day, thinking how wrong it felt. At home I dropped my laptop in a corner and didn’t touch in again until this morning when my inbox groaned open to reveal 750 waiting mails, spam and all. I am not bragging. Many other colleagues go on vacation with their Blackberrys and feel obliged to continue to be on call. Colleagues in other geographies.

Instead, my husband and I packed up the Volvo with essential kit for us (including a novel of 1,300 pages for him), loaded up the kids and their even weightier kit and drove across France to northern Spain. Where I was promptly rewarded for the stress of the previous weeks with a raging fever that put me to bed for days. But I wasn’t complaining. I had seen the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. In all its glory. A thing of true beauty:

I had two wonderful – shorter – novels waiting for me (Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes and The Sea, by John Banville) and nothing to do but enjoy the foreignness of Spain. At least once a year I need to get out of Germany. I need to experience a different culture for a longer period of time. Actually my job has taken me on some wonderful trips in the past years – to India and China. Although they are work-related, I still enjoy the people, the food, the sounds, the sites, the shopping. In Spain, it was no different. We were lucky to have a friend, Maria Eugenia, in Cantabria who was our translator, guide, and hostess for two weeks. Maru, as she is known, teaches Greek and Latin in the local school, and directs theatre on her summer vacations. Maru is an intellectual Lolita, who can talk Aristoteles and Lorca, who wears a tiny string bikini at the beach and had a considerable collection of low cut t-shirts that showed her best feature to full advantage. She recommended the following novelists to me, none of which I have ever read: Anita Nair, Rosina Lippi, Natalie Ginzburg, and José Saramago.

My boys were delighted to find a surf school at the beach at St. Vincente de la Barquera. Run by a university educated and multilingual German surfer dude, the school is located directly at the beach, which in turn is located in a national park. No highrise condominiums here. Just VW buses with German licence plates camping illegally in the meagre parking zone. Surfnsoul was lots of fun – highly recommended. My boys will return in glory sometime to ride the waves. The blistering hot beaches are not my scene however. I was the one hovering under a beach umbrella, wearing a hat the size of a wagonwheel and wearing a longsleeve shirt. I can just feel my skin frying like bacon in a pan if I stay too long in the sun. Not so obviously the five topless lovelies stretched out in their full glory at the beach. Not a book or newspaper in sight, these ladies were at the beach for the hard work of turning even nuttier brown. Occasionally one of them would reapply some tanning oil, but they did not talk, swim, eat or even drink. Now they look fantastic. In twenty years?

My eldest brother sends a very minor correction to my last post: “The car with the fins was a 1960 DeSoto. I always loved that car as it had quite a large V-8 motor and had lots of pick-up. I remember  cruising in it when gas was 25 cents a gallon.”

Actually it was not a cousin, but a cousin’s husband who gave me the photo you see in my last post. Here is a link to his photo archive, which will mostly interest family, but also history buffs. When Dave sent me the link to his archive, a treasure trove of doozies of my sisters on really bad 70’s hair days, I also found this graphically and sartorially pleasing image from the 60s:

I love the horizontal cladding of the garage ontrasting with the vertical lines of the sleeveless blouse and the harmony of blues. But above all I like the shorts and top set in that Mondrian print in the back corner. Three of the girls here are my sisters (including the one in the striped top and the one in the Mondrian outfit); my brother is here too. The others are some of our 88 first cousins.