In the middle of putting a a top 10 list of SAP Mentor highlights from 2009 together, it dawned on me, that these would be my highlights, and that the SAP Mentors may have totally different ones. So I challenged every mentor to come up with one highlight slide to be presented at the next SAP Mentor Monday on the 18th of January @1pm PST.
I know for many it was the exclusive meetings with Vishal Sikka during TechEd in Phoenix and Bangalore this year. See the happy faces on the picture below. (It was also the last time you saw them in their native garp 😉 More or less pre-rugby shirt.) So I told the SAP Mentors to go beyond this.
Depending on how many slides we will get, we will do something similar to my favorite radio show: This American Life did in 2008: 20+ Acts in 60 Minutes. We will start right on time to be able to cover at much ground in one hour as we can.
Having high signal conversations with SAP Executives was definitely a highlight of the SAP Mentor year.
While looking back to 2009 I realized that there was also a low point, a record that I have not set straight yet.
SAP Mentor Oliver Kohl in 2008 created a screen saver using the SAP Mentor logo and he came up with the tag line: Open Thinking! (Which I mention in the SAP Mentor Highlights 2008 post.)It really captures nicely one of the pillars that the SAP Mentor initiative is standing on. I loved it so much, that I used it at the bottom of our SAP Mentor flag as well as embossed in the SAP Mentor Moleskine note books that we created and gave to people that helped the SAP Mentor initiative in one way or another.
I should have asked Oliver, whether he is O.K. for us to use it and also somewhere point out who the source was. Thankfully SAP Mentor Dennis Howlett did an excellent job writing about it (the picture to the right is also from Dennis, with Oliver pointing to the phrase: Open Thinking!.)
Dennis writes: It is no coincidence that Mentors have as their unofficial motto ‘Open Thinking’ a term coined by Oliver Kohland a theme SAP has picked up (as you can see from the photo above.) It’s much more than a cute expression but a way of getting past the ‘Not Invented Here’ axiom that characterizes much of what we see at SAP.
Update: Christian Guenther took the flag picture with Oliver.
Well said and sorry again for using the term without checking first with you Oliver.
Can't wait for the SAP Mentor Monday webinar to see and hear what the highlights were for SAP Mentors in 2009.
