I was raised in a working-class family on Long Island and didn’t step on an airplane until I was 18. For us, a trip to the Jersey Shore was quite a treat. Even though I wasn’t well traveled, I learned a lot about diversity in my own neighborhood. Long Island was a melting pot, and I worked a lot of jobs—a paper route, pumping gas, stocking shelves in a grocery store—that taught me to deal with all kinds of people. In high school I bought the small delicatessen where I worked when it was facing a distress sale. I borrowed $7,500, including interest, and promised to pay it back in a year. I managed the deli myself and used the profits to help my family and to put myself through college. Dealing with 500 customers a day helped me develop empathy for other people and realize how a small gesture like giving a customer credit—or even just respect—can make a big difference. That’s a universal concept that applies anywhere in the world.
SAP’s CEO on Being the American Head of a German Multinational
The author’s first overseas business assignment came when he was 29 and a sales manager at Xerox, running a team in New York City. The company sent him to Puerto Rico to turn around its failing business there. Because he didn’t know the culture or the market, he arrived without an agenda and just listened to people for two weeks. He learned a few important phrases in Spanish so that he could relate to his new team. His experience there helped him later in his career, when he had to manage people across a variety of cultures.
In 2002 SAP hired McDermott to head its North American business, which was struggling. He viewed the company’s belief that it could simply transfer its strategies for the German market to the U.S. market as part of the problem. “Leading in any country is all about reading the room, respecting the culture, and understanding the nuances of how people perceive information,” he writes. “You have to care about what the culture needs instead of just focusing on your agenda and how to get it done.”
In one illustration of that, although he and his wife have kept the family home in Philadelphia, he moved into a house in Heidelberg to demonstrate to his employees that being a part of the German culture is important to him.
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