Sap Company Quotes

My former boss Dan Burke once handed me a note that said: “Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year!” He was telling me not to invest in small projects that would sap my and the company’s resources and not give much back.

As with Jack, the discriminating milieu of loneliness moved Hugh to raise the stakes of solitude, not from a wish to spare himself the sapping drudgery of a conventional, passionless marriage, but rather to gamble on the existence of a just goddess. Like Jack’s, his core being was attuned solely to the enrapturing company of a scintillating paragon, to a woman who was indivisibly and alluringly noble.

When I was in the street throwing a beanbag with the other children and Mr. Tanaka happened to stroll out of the seafood company, I always stopped what I was doing to watch him. I lay there on that slimy table while Mr. Tanaka examined my lip, pulling it down with his fingers and tipping my head this way and that. All at once he caught sight of my gray eyes, which were fixed on his face with such fascination, I couldn't pretend I hadn't been staring at him. He didn't give me a sneer, as if to say that I was an impudent girl, and he didn't look away as if it made no difference where I looked or what I thought. We stared at each other for a long moment-so long it gave me a chill even there in the muggy air of the seafood company. "I know you," he said at last. "You're old Sakamoto's little girl." Even as a child I could tell that Mr. Tanaka saw the world around him as it really was; he never wore the dazed look of my father. To me, he seemed to see the sap bleeding from the trunks of the pine trees, and the circle of brightness in the sky where the sun was smothered by clouds. He lived in the world that was visible, even if it didn't always please him to be there. I knew he noticed the trees, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he'd ever noticed me. Perhaps this is why when he spoke to me, tears came stinging to my eyes.

All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.

Friendship is not merely devoid of virtue, like conversation, it is fatal to us as well. For the sense of boredom which those of us whose law of development is purely internal cannot help but feel in a friend’s company (when, that is to say, we must remain on the surface of ourselves, instead of pursuing our voyage of discovery into the depths)—that first impression of boredom our friendship impels us to correct when we are alone again, to recall with emotion the words which our friend said to us, to look upon them as a valuable addition to our substance, when the fact is that we are not like buildings to which stones can be added from without, but like trees which draw from their own sap the next knot that will appear on their trunks, the spreading roof of their foliage.

...the Nixon administration also blocked the efforts of the UN and the Arab states, and at times even its own State Department, to settle the Palestine question, helping to maintain the forms of instability and conflict on which American ‘security’ policy would now increasingly depend. In Kurdistan, the other conflict keeping Arab states ‘pinned down’, Washington was unable to prevent Iraq from reaching a settlement with the Kurds in 1970, but responded to this threat of stability in the Gulf two years later by agreeing with Israel and Iran to reopen the conflict with renewed military support to one of the Kurdish factions. The aim was not to enable the Kurds to win political rights, according to a later Congressional investigation, but simply to ‘continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally’s neighboring country [Iraq]’. The arms sales to Iran and their supporting doctrine played no important role in protecting the Gulf or defending American control of the region’s oil. In fact the major US oil companies lobbied against the increased supply of weapons to Iran and the doctrine used to justify them. They argued that political stability in the Gulf could be better secured by America ending its support for Israel’s occupation of Arab territories and allowing a settlement of the Palestine question. The Nixon administration had also initiated a large increase in the sale of arms to Israel, although weapons sent to Israel were paid for not with local oil revenues but by US taxpayers. Arming Iran, an ally of Israel, the companies argued, only worsened the one-sidedness of America’s Middle East policy.

Our current battle: we have to save the customer from Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

I WOULD OFTEN think back to that Santelli clip, which foreshadowed so many of the political battles I’d face during my presidency. For there was at least one sideways truth in what he’d said: Our demands on the government had changed over the past two centuries, since the time the Founders had chartered it. Beyond the fundamentals of repelling enemies and conquering territory, enforcing property rights and policing issues that property-holding white men deemed necessary to maintain order, our early democracy had largely left each of us to our own devices. Then a bloody war was fought to decide whether property rights extended to treating Blacks as chattel. Movements were launched by workers, farmers, and women who had experienced firsthand how one man’s liberty too often involved their own subjugation. A depression came, and people learned that being left to your own devices could mean penury and shame. Which is how the United States and other advanced democracies came to create the modern social contract. As our society grew more complex, more and more of the government’s function took the form of social insurance, with each of us chipping in through our tax dollars to protect ourselves collectively—for disaster relief if our house was destroyed in a hurricane; unemployment insurance if we lost a job; Social Security and Medicare to lessen the indignities of old age; reliable electricity and phone service for those who lived in rural areas where utility companies wouldn’t otherwise make a profit; public schools and universities to make education more egalitarian. It worked, more or less. In the span of a generation and for a majority of Americans, life got better, safer, more prosperous, and more just. A broad middle class flourished. The rich remained rich, if maybe not quite as rich as they would have liked, and the poor were fewer in number, and not as poor as they’d otherwise have been. And if we sometimes debated whether taxes were too high or certain regulations were discouraging innovation, whether the “nanny state” was sapping individual initiative or this or that program was wasteful, we generally understood the advantages of a society that at least tried to offer a fair shake to everyone and built a floor beneath which nobody could sink.

When I look back on that time now, I think of it as a hard-earned lesson about the importance of tenacity and perseverance, but also about the need to steer clear of anger and anxiety over things you can’t control. I can’t overstate how important it is to keep blows to the ego, real as they often are, from occupying too big a place in your mind and sapping too much of your energy. It’s easy to be optimistic when everyone is telling you you’re great. It’s much harder, and much more necessary, when your sense of yourself is being challenged, and in such a public way.

as a leader you can’t communicate that pessimism to the people around you. It’s ruinous to morale. It saps energy and inspiration. Decisions get made from a protective, defensive posture.

We can shorten our workdays and add joy to our work if we learn to get ahold of activity clutter. Activity clutter comes from the things we do that take up precious time and sap our energy but don’t make a meaningful difference to our personal, professional, or even company’s mission. These things include meetings that don’t produce new information or better decisions, projects with little chance of being completed, and painstakingly polished presentations that lack substantive content. On average, we spend less than half our workday on our main job responsibilities, with the rest of our time taken up by interruptions, nonessential tasks, administrative tasks, emails, and meetings. How did we end up like this? Fortunately, psychology provides some answers. There are three traps that can lead to activity clutter: overearning by working too hard for the wrong results, prioritizing urgent tasks over important ones, and multitasking.

you used to be able to do fine just by deploying SAP better than the next guy. That’s no longer the case. Today, IT is where you compete. It’s where you spin up new services, new experiences. It’s where you set up test beds and experiments. It’s where you iterate and scale. It’s where you find the freedom to grow.

You can’t wear your disdain for people on your sleeve, though. You end up either cowing them into submission or frustrating them into complacency. Either way, you sap them of the pride they take in their work. Over time, nearly everyone abdicated responsibility to Peter and Strat Planning, and Michael was comforted by the analytical rigor they represented.

It is satisfying, of course, to build up a supply of winter warmth, free except for the labor. But there is also something heady about becoming a part of the forest process. It sounds straightforward enough to say that when I cut firewood I cull and thin my woods, but that puts me in the business of deciding which trees should be encouraged and which should be taken. I like my great tall black walnut, so I have cut the trees around it to give it the space and light it needs to grow generously. Dogwoods don’t care. They frost the woods with white blossoms in the spring, and grow extravagantly in close company. If I clear a patch, within a year or two pine seedlings move in, grow up exuberantly, compete and thin themselves to tolerable spacing. If I don’t cut a diseased tree, its neighbors may sicken and die. If I cut away one half of a forked white oak, the remaining trunk will grow straight and sturdy. Sap gone, a standing dead tree like the one I cut today will make good firewood, and so invites cutting. But if I leave it, it will make a home for woodpeckers, and later for flying squirrels and screech owls. Where I leave a brush pile of top branches, rabbits make a home. If I leave a fallen tree, others will benefit: ants, spiders, beetles and wood roaches will use it for shelter and food, and lovely delicate fungi will grow out of it before it mixes with leaf mold to become a part of a new layer of soil. One person with a chain saw makes a difference in the woods, and by making a difference becomes part of the woodland cycle, a part of the abstraction that is the forest community.

Near the end of his tenure as co-CEO of SAP, Jim Hagemann Snabe discovered that the German software giant had amassed more than fifty thousand key performance indicators (KPIs), covering every job across the company. Snabe was horrified. “We were trying to run the company by remote control,” he recalls. “We had all this amazing talent, but had asked them to put their brains on ice.

The enterprise management platform company SAP uses a social currency like that of iStockphoto or Stack Overflow to motivate developers to answer one another’s questions. Points earned when the employee of a development company answers a question are credited to a company account; when the account reaches a specified level, SAP makes a generous contribution to a charity of the company’s choice. The system has saved SAP $6–8 million in tech support costs, generated numerous new product and service ideas, and reduced average response time

common as for Japanese televisions. By 1979, it took American workers three times as long to assemble their sets.”4 I like to refer to this strategy as addition by subtraction.5 fn2 The Japanese companies looked for every point of friction in the manufacturing process and eliminated it. As they subtracted wasted effort, they added customers and revenue. Similarly, when we remove the points of friction that sap our time and energy, we can achieve more with less effort. (This is one reason tidying up can feel so good: we are simultaneously moving forward and lightening the cognitive load our environment places on us.)

But I tell you, I did some real fretting, and honestly, if it hadn’t been for the fact that God and I parted company so long ago, I might have even been sap enough to pray for him.

Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) In Italy these are called girasole, meaning “turn with the sun.” They really are a type of sunflower and should not be confused with the globe artichoke, which is an entirely different plant. Jerusalem artichokes, a native Amerian plant, were known to and used by the Indians. They are a good companion to corn. The tuber is the edible portion, for this sunflower has its surprise at the bottom, the flowers being attractive but not large. The principal food content of the Jerusalem artichoke is inulin, a tasteless, white polysaccharide dissolved in the sap of the roots, which can be converted into levulose sugar. This is of special interest to diabetics, for levulose is highly nutritious and the sweetest of all known natural sugars. Levulose also occurs in most fruits, in the company of dextrose, which diabetics must avoid, but in the Jerusalem artichoke it is present alone. The artichokes are high in food value and rich in vitamins. They may be cooked or eaten raw in salads.

A variety of companies, ranging from financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase and UBS to technology companies like SAP, Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft, have neurodiversity hiring initiatives.

My former boss Dan Burke once handed me a note that said: “Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year!” He was telling me not to invest in small projects that would sap my and the company’s resources and not give much back. I still have that note in my desk, and I use it when talking to our executives about what to pursue and where to put their energy.

In today's rapidly changing business landscape, organizations are under constant pressure to adapt, innovate, and make data-driven decisions. To meet these challenges head-on, many companies turn to SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products) software, a leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. At the heart of SAP real-time projects lies the fundamental premise of leveraging technology to address complex business challenges. These projects aim to harness the capabilities of SAP software to optimize processes, streamline operations, and enhance decision-making. They are not mere simulations but practical, hands-on applications within live business environments. Each real-time project revolves around a specific business goal, and its success is often gauged by the extent to which these objectives are achieved. SAP real-time projects are as diverse as the organizations that undertake them. They encompass a variety of initiatives, each tailored to meet specific business needs.

The smells of the forest- the damp dark of the soil, the bleeding sap of the trees, the lemony cedar smell- all vanish in the company of the Sicilian food: the pungent garlic in Zio Mario's salami, the vinegar pickling the vegetables, olives bobbing in brine, roasted peppers, the ubiquitous, sunshine-colored olive oil. It's a kind of colonization. The forest is one of ours now.

Some people have a perpetual problem. They always have a sad song. If you allow them, they’ll use you as a trash can to dump all their garbage in. You spend an hour with them and you feel like you’ve run a marathon. They’re energy suckers. You leave them feeling drained and worn out. You cannot continue to deal with them day after day if you expect to reach your highest potential. You won’t lift off. You won’t thrust forward into the good things God has in store if you’re weighted down, letting people dump their loads on you. They’ll make you discouraged and drain your energy. It’s hard enough just to keep yourself cheered up. You’re not responsible for their happiness. Sure, there are times when we need to sow a seed and have a listening ear and take time to love people back into wholeness. But that should be for a season and not an ongoing drama. You shouldn’t spend every day listening to friends complain about their spouses or their neighbors. If you do, your life will be like an episode of Guiding Light, Jersey Shore, and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills all put together. You have enough drama in your life without listening to everyone else’s drama. You can’t allow someone to put that negativity in you day after day if you expect to soar. You need to evaluate the people you’re spending time with. Are they lifters and encouragers? Do they make you feel better? Do you leave their company feeling inspired and happier, or are they dragging you down, making you feel drained, and sapping your energy?

If I, today, imagine how I’d respond to stocks falling 30 percent, I picture a world where everything is like it is today except stock valuations, which are 30 percent cheaper. But that’s not how the world works. Downturns don’t happen in isolation. The reason stocks might fall 30 percent is because big groups of people, companies, and politicians screwed something up, and their screwups might sap my confidence in our ability to recover.