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Business News/ Companies / People/  SAP CEO’s lesson from losing eye: ‘How could I get this lucky?’
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SAP CEO’s lesson from losing eye: ‘How could I get this lucky?’

Born to a blue-collar family in New York, McDermott made his way from a working- class upbringing and climbed the ranks to run SAP

A file photo of SAP CEO Bill McDermott, who lost his left eye in a fluke accident last year. Photo: ReutersPremium
A file photo of SAP CEO Bill McDermott, who lost his left eye in a fluke accident last year. Photo: Reuters

Singapore/Frankfurt: Bill McDermott, chief executive officer of SAP SE, thought he had told his life story when he published his memoir in 2014. Then he lost his left eye in a fluke accident last year. He’s now decided to write another book, this one about how people can bounce back from adversity.

“I never thought that I would do the second book," said McDermott, 54, during an interview in Singapore. “I do have the next book in me now. It’s going to speak to not just the underdog who’s got the dream, but to the people that have been knocked down in so many ways."

McDermott’s accident happened when he fell down the stairs of his brother’s home holding a water glass in the middle of the night. A shard of glass lodged in his eye. He was knocked unconscious and when he came to, he found himself lying in a pool of blood. Instead of panicking, he said he felt oddly serene. His mind was telling him that it was okay to go to sleep because if he stood up, it was going to be harder.

“I started thinking, ‘I gotta get up and I gotta make it because my story hasn’t been told yet,’" said McDermott, who was wearing a pair of tinted glasses and still has prominent scars on the left side of his face and neck.

He staggered outside and lay down on the street until someone called emergency services.

McDermott’s near-death experience adds more drama to the life he chronicled in his book, Winners Dream: A Journey From Corner Store to Corner Office. Born to a blue-collar family on New York’s Long Island, McDermott made his way from a working- class upbringing and climbed the ranks to run SAP, one of the world’s largest software companies with about 75,000 employees.

Topping estimates

SAP this week reported preliminary fourth-quarter sales and profit that topped analysts’ estimates as businesses signed deals for its latest flagship software.

Under McDermott’s leadership, SAP has moved into cloud computing and rolled out a major update to its core software for running finance, manufacturing and logistics at tens of thousands of businesses. It has also expanded to new services through acquisitions including its $7.4 billion purchase of Concur Technologies.

Since he became the sole CEO of the German software giant on 21 May, 2014, SAP shares have climbed 30% through 11 January, compared with a 3.6% gain in the Bloomberg European Technology Index.

At SAP, he’s deepening the company’s health-care business by focusing on digitized information that can easily be shared and analyzed. He said the patient’s ability to access their complete medical records could be vital in an emergency if they are being treated by doctors who otherwise wouldn’t know their history.

“Why would the patients have to keep repeating the same story?" he said. “The system is messed up."

One of the realizations from his own ordeal is that God doesn’t take anything from people without giving them something back, according to McDermott. What he got in return, he said, was a rare perspective.

“The outlook that I have now is so calm, so clear, so in control that it’s almost awe-inspiring even to me," he said. “I’m like, ‘How could I get this lucky?’ That’s how I feel."

To tell the rest of his story, McDermott said he has quietly started working on the second book.

“There is another way you get knocked down that I’ve got some insight into now," he said. “You will get your test. The question is what you do when you get it." Bloomberg

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Published: 12 Jan 2016, 08:17 PM IST
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