The radical leader with a revolutionary plan for Europe
LOCATIONS: London, UK Paris, France
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: German, Dutch, English, French and Hebrew
CURRENT ROLES:
Chairman, Syncron
Chairman, Eudonet
NED MercuryGate
Schneider-Electric SE Nice Systems
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLES:
Chairman, Harvest
CEO, Hewlett-Packard Company
CEO, SAP
BOARDWAVE ROLES: Patron and Board Member
There are many words that could describe the French- German businessman Léo Apotheker, but one that leaps out is “radical”. During a 20-year career at SAP, culminating in the role of CEO, Apotheker oversaw some progressive changes at the company. These changes led to 18 consecutive quarters of double-digit software revenue growth between 2004 and 2009, and helped the firm become the largest business software application company in the world.
Now he’s turned his mind to the European technology scene, and he has some pretty radical ideas on how to help it develop. Apotheker wants to unify the fragmented European stock exchanges in favour of a single pan-European technology stock market, similar to Nasdaq. “Nobody wants to IPO in Europe anymore because we have shallow markets. They’re all too small and therefore the smart investors are not here. Hence why there is too little expertise on the sell side as well,” he says.
Apotheker explains that, when he is passionate about something, he is willing to “move mountains” for it. And one of his great passions is enterprise software. “I love it because it solves real problems, hard ones.” It is, he says, the “least appreciated part of technology”.
“It’s hidden, but it is what keeps the lights on, what makes the trains run, what gets planes off the ground. It is what keeps society ticking. Some of it is clunky, some of it is ugly, sometimes it doesn’t work and we all complain. But the vast majority of the time, it does work or society would have collapsed.”
Vive la révolution
Apotheker’s rebellious spirit is a characteristic that he’s grown up with. He describes his teenage self as a “horrible pupil” and someone who was “terrible at following rules”. In fact, aged only 16, he organised a strike at his strict all-boys school. “It was the 1st of April and, as an April Fool’s joke, someone had replaced the hammer in our school bell with a mackerel,” he says. “It was freezing cold in Antwerp and the headmaster made us stand outside for an hour and a half,” Apotheker says. “He wanted someone to step forward and say that they’d done it, and he was putting pressure on all the others to say who it was.”
The culprit was pinpointed but the whole process left Apotheker feeling disgusted. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “Afterwards, I gathered a few people together and I said, ‘We can’t take this anymore.’” His inner circle spread the word and persuaded 1,600 pupils to join the strike, with an aim to change to some of the harsher school rules. The school strike was a success and gave Apotheker an insight that has stayed with him throughout his career: he realised that you need to get people onside, especially when planning drastic change. “One of the first things I learned was that, if you want to influence people, you need friends,” he says.
Apotheker’s parents were not impressed with his revolutionary actions though. Before Apotheker was born, his Jewish parents had lived in Eastern Poland and, when the Nazis invaded, they realised they had to leave. They planned an escape to Palestine via Russia and Iran. “That didn’t happen. As the Nazis invaded Russia, they got pushed more and more eastward and they ended up on the Chinese border,” Apotheker says.
After the war, Apotheker’s parents settled in Germany for a while. Their wartime experience impacted how they brought up their son. “I think my parents always had a very positive outlook on life. They figured that, if you’re capable and willing to put the effort in, you can overcome anything. Which they did, obviously.”
In the family household “underachieving was not an option”, he says. After his rebellious youth, Apotheker studied economicsat a university in Jerusalem. Not only did he become “a better student”, he also discovered programming. “I wasn’t a very good programmer – I am still not a good programmer – but it gave me a glance of what software and technology could actually do.”
After university, he was hired by inter-bank network Swift where he was put on a fast track to management. His training was with the then EVP of Swift, a French engineer who became his mentor and who tasked him with overseeing a new internal IT system. “It put me in touch with the software industry, which was very, very nascent. I fell in love with that industry and I decided I wanted to do this for the rest of my life,” he says. “And then I joined SAP.” When Apotheker joined SAP, the company was still small with
just 300 employees. Today, it has a staff of more than 100,000.
At SAP, Apotheker gained a reputation for being a tough boss, something he acknowledges. “I was very intolerant of sloppiness but if somebody did high-quality work and the results didn’t work out, such a person would get full support and acknowledgement. I always operated under the principle that everyone gets at
least a second chance,” he says. “If you want to run a high- performance and quality business, you need high standards.”
Courting trouble
Apotheker’s 20 years at SAP were followed by a short tenure at HP, which wasn’t regarded as quite the same success. In fact, HP’s acquisition of British software firm Autonomy has been described by some as the worst corporate deal in history. “When I joined, HP was the most run-down company in the Valley. I wanted to save the company and turn it into a growth opportunity and add some new cutting-edge technology,” he says.
Apotheker wanted a game-changer and Autonomy, a British software firm that was capable of structuring and interpreting unstructured data for voice, images and video, seemed to fit the bill. “This was supposed to be the foundation of HP’s future strategy in the AI space,” Apotheker says. “The lesson I learned is that no matter how much due diligence you do, the one thing you cannot discover is fraud,” he says. “We had 600 people doing due diligence and we never discovered this.”
Apotheker says that he took the job at HP because of the opportunity to “change course radically” but he learned that there comes a point in a company’s history when even the most extreme change is not enough. “At a given point, you cannot alter a company any more. HP was mismanaged for years and it was the fading star of the industry. And that is really sad because HP was this revolutionary company in the 1960s. It was Apple before Apple.”
Live and learn
The software industry veteran has witnessed both great successes and failures during his career. And he’s been given some tips along the way. “I got two pieces of great advice in my career. The first was to hire people who are much better than you and who can replace you immediately. And the second was, if you do something, do a few things but do them really, really well.” CEOs need to “walk the talk”, he says. “If they want to be really successful then they should be the incarnation of the company. The values, the product, the value proposition.”
Despite being in his 70s, Apotheker shows no signs of slowing down. He’s still putting in 50-plus hour weeks in his various roles, which include serving on two public boards, and Boardwave’s board. Looking back on his time in the industry, Apotheker describes it as “extremely gratifying”.“I had the unbelievable good fortune not only to help build a great company but also to be an actor and a witness in the early days of the software industry, as well as the shaping of how it is today,” he says. “And that is an immense privilege.”
Tips From The Top
What are your tips for a successful business?
1. Hire the best people.
2. Walk the talk.
3. Focus on the essentials, and don’t waste your time on a whole bunch of details.
Can you tell us something surprising about yourself?
I’m a family man and a doting grandfather.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?This might sound very old-fashioned but my PC, which I think will be with us for quite some time. I think it will turn into an AI machine.
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