Tribal Council Meet @ ASUG Annual Conference

Fellow SAP Mentor Paul Kurchina made may day when he send me an email with the subject line: You will like this.

How right he was, pointing me to an ASUG press release announcing that Seth Godin is going to keynote the ASUG Annual Conference happening next week. An event which is co-located with SAPPHIRE NOW. Never have I been looking forward to an ASUG keynote as much as this one.

If you have ever been introduced to the SAP Mentor initiative, you know why.

Years ago Craig Cmehil and I realized what a difference it would make to create an initiative around your most passionate community influencers and how that would be beneficial for everyone involved. It is fulfilling the promise of Enterprise 2.0 of creating tighter bonds, greater engagement and shorter feedback loops within a company’s ecosystem of customers, partners and individual consultants.

We created the SAP Mentor initiative. At the beginning it was hard to make people understand its potential. There was a lot of uncertainty and fear of the new that we needed to overcome. Then Seth Godin came out with his book Tribes with the Money Quote on page 30: Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe.

Seth is just an amazing communicator. With that quote, he hit the essence of what we were working on, what we are achieving with the SAP Mentors. It clicked, with SAP Mentors we are assembling SAP’s tribe.

People understand it or at least it piqued their interest and they pay close attention.
This is why for years I start off my SAP Mentor introduction slide deck with Seth’s quote:

          Sap Mentor Initiative Introduction by Mark Finnern

Link to SAP Mentor Introduction Slide Deck.

With the help of the SAP Mentors we have updated that slide deck just today. With 20K+ it is the most viewed official SAP deck on Slideshare.

I always wanted to ping Seth and tell him what amazing things happen when a company fully embraces his Tribe concept. Well, we started before his book came out, but it just confirmed that we are on the right track and that gave us the extra boost of confidence,

Have I piqued your interest too? More details you can find at SAP Mentors’ main page http://sapmentors.sap.com

Over the years we have also collected a couple of stories where SAP Mentors are making a difference in the SAP Ecosystem: Kick-Starting a Virtuous Circle in Field Sales;Tales of Two Inside Tracks, SAP Mentor-Style; All for One and HANA for All; Advocating for Excellence; Tree of Talent; The Inside Track on Community Engagement; Trust + Results = Success

I am convinced that at a moment other enterprises realize the power of such an engagement and will start to develop tribes for their organizations too.

Seth is amazing at crystallizing trends and making them accessible to us, that is why I can’t wait to hear him talk on Tuesday later afternoon as part of the ASUG Annual Conference keynote. Find me at the front of the stage proudly wearing my SAP Mentor shirt with the number 88 🙂