Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of wall and broad streets in New York city, you're inside the ICE house. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at ISIS 12 exchanges and six clearing houses around the world. And now welcome inside the ICE house.
Josh King:
In 2019, Intercontinental Exchange launched Insights, an online gateway that is home to inside the ICE house. And several other thought leadership platforms produced here at the New York Stock Exchange and across ICE. Included on the slate is Slice, an interview style program that seeks to unearth what entrepreneurs and disruptive brands are doing to change our way of life and our future. The interviews conducted by NYSE's executive vice chairman, Betty Liu are condensed into seven minute segments that are broadcast on Cheddar business and can be streamed from the ice.com/insights. In a recent slice episode, Betty sat down with SAPs, Jennifer Morgan her name should sound familiar to listeners of this podcast from where we previewed an episode of Jennifer's podcast, A Call to Lead, with New York Stock Exchange, president Stacey Cunningham in early March, 2019. Jennifer's had a story career at SAP which of course can be found at NYSE ticker symbol SAP, including being the first American woman named to the technology giants executive board.
Josh King:
Last month, she was named president of SAP's Cloud business group giving her end to end responsibility for the company's Cloud lines of business. Betty and Jennifer sat down in the NYCE's boardroom to explore the present and future of Cloud computing. Jennifer shared how SAP's marque acquisition of Qualtrics will allow companies to combine the X's and O's of data to understand what has happened in real time, in order to predict what may happen in the future. The conversation then turns to Jennifer's unique perspective on management, leadership and best practices for building strong workplace cultures. She shares what she's has learned over her career at SAP and how her leadership style developed. The result of all the ground that Betty and Jennifer covered was a recording far longer than needed with only 25% of the conversation making the final cut that debuted on Cheddar a couple weeks ago.
Josh King:
Today inside the ICE house is bringing listeners the full uncut conversation, but between Betty Liu and Jennifer Morgan. How will understanding the X's and O's of data disrupt every business in the world? What do we all need to know about experience management and gaining management experience. The full uncut slice conversation between Betty and Jennifer, right after this.
Speaker 3:
We began with a vision to transform energy trading through technology, creating a modern accessible marketplace, the level, the playing field and drove transparency. Today, Intercontinental Exchange operates markets around the world. We provide data, people rely on and connect participants to support investing, trading, hedging and capital raising, driving the world forward, well-functioning markets play a critical role in advancing economies and create opportunities for those who build them. And we innovate to ensure our markets serve the world every step of the way. When you turn on a light switch, we help ensure that energy is priced efficiently from fields to your cup each day, from farms to your table and products that enable financial opportunity. At Intercontinental Exchange, we build, operate and advance, global financial and commodity markets. It starts here.
Betty Liu:
All right. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me here on Slice.
Jennifer Morgan:
Thank you for having me Betty. I'm excited to be here.
Betty Liu:
I'm so looking forward to this conversation. Okay. First off though, for some of those, I mean, SAP has been around for a very long time, very quickly for our audience. Just tell us in a snapshot, what's the elevator pitch on SAP?
Jennifer Morgan:
So most of every company you've probably ever heard of in the Fortune 500 run SAP. SAP essentially helps companies manage all the operations across the enterprise. So if a customer buys something, a company has to make that product, fulfill product, deliver that product, account for that product. So all the processes across enterprise, from the customer, all the way back to finance, human resources, procurement, we run and integrate all of those operations of a business so that it can be completely connected.
Betty Liu:
And you have recently from being promoted to this role of running the Cloud business.
Jennifer Morgan:
Yes.
Betty Liu:
Congratulations.
Jennifer Morgan:
Thank you.
Betty Liu:
By the way.
Jennifer Morgan:
Thank you.
Betty Liu:
So Cloud has become increasingly important for SAP. Why?
Jennifer Morgan:
Well, if you think about what Cloud allows companies to do. It allows them to move faster. It allows them to innovate quicker at a much more efficient rate, lower cost. And the Cloud is where most of our customers are heading and for us to take our technology, our business applications, and allow customers to have a combination of all of that intellectual property and experience combined with the benefits of the Cloud is really what our customers are looking for. And so that's really important for us and that creates a recurring revenue, a more predictable revenue stream. And so for us, we are moving into that area very, very quickly. Our growth has been phenomenal. We announced our earnings yesterday and some revised guidance for the next five years. So we're real bullish on where we're headed in the Cloud.
Betty Liu:
Where is it headed? What are you learning and where is it headed?
Jennifer Morgan:
So, today, there's so much disruption going on, you hear about everybody and what they're doing with technology. And if you boil down why, what's driving that, most companies today and most new companies are being formed as a result of exploiting an experience gap that another company has. If you think about Uber, you think about Lyft or you think about Airbnb, they're creating a better experience, a more easy experience than the traditional cab companies weren't creating. And so that's how businesses are being formed. And traditional businesses are saying, where do I have those gaps in experience in terms of products that aren't providing the right experience or services that aren't delivering the experience that my consumer wants, because somebody can step to that experience gap and create a better service, a better product. So companies are trying to disrupt themselves in order to avoid being disrupted by others.
Jennifer Morgan:
So for us, we believe experience management is going to be a category that every company is really going to be clamoring to understand and create amazing experiences around services, around products, around their brands for their employees, because if they're not identifying those gaps and filling them with better solutions, better product services, somebody else will. And so for us, we made an acquisition Qualtrics.
Betty Liu:
Yes.
Jennifer Morgan:
And we're very excited about this acquisition because we feel that.
Betty Liu:
It was one of the biggest for SAP, right?
Jennifer Morgan:
It was. Exactly.
Betty Liu:
Eight billion plus.
Jennifer Morgan:
Exactly. And we're real excited about this category, because where in, maybe the '90s and early 2000s, it was about CRM. That was a view around for the salesperson to better understand how do I go out and understand everything around my consumer. Well, now everything's really around the consumer. And how do you understand that consumer.
Betty Liu:
And what they're experiencing.
Jennifer Morgan:
Exactly. And what experience you want to create.
Betty Liu:
Okay.
Jennifer Morgan:
So if you think about every company does surveys and they have lots of different human sentiment of their consumers or their employees telling them what they think about a certain product or service, that's nothing new, but that's everywhere. And the magic happens when you can really create a platform and understand how you combine that X data, the experience data with all the operational data, a company has. An operational system and data tells you what's happened. It gives you information around your financials or your people or what people bought. That's important data, and people run companies around that people talk about big data and trying to look at that data in different ways, but by combining the operational data, that tells you what happened with the X data, that's telling you why it's happening.
Jennifer Morgan:
It gives you a complete different insight into the business. So many companies might look at an NPS score. That's a great piece of X data. It tells you how happy your customers are, but you want to make sure that you're serving and that you're focused on understanding who are my most profitable customers. Is that how NPS score associated with, my most loyal and profitable customers or not. That's very different way of looking at the business. And so we call that a multi instrument approach. If you're flying an airplane and you're looking at your altitude gauge and it tells you're 3000 feet off the ground, and then you look at your speed gauge and you're going 500 miles an hour. All of a sudden you look at your situation much differently than if you were looking at one of those gauges individually. So we build that combination of the X and O data is going to give businesses a completely different perspective around having much more of a leading indicator approach to managing their business, versus just being able to talk about what happened and maybe what might happen.
Betty Liu:
I remember that merger or that acquisition because everybody was on the floor, big Xs and O, Ryan and Bill up there.
Jennifer Morgan:
That's right.
Betty Liu:
On the podium.
Jennifer Morgan:
The combination of that XO data is really how we see experience management being able to be really unlocked in new ways for companies.
Betty Liu:
Is there a case example to just bring it home on the ground for someone?
Jennifer Morgan:
Sure. Yeah. Think about in the '90s, there used to be a time when smoking was allowed on flights. And Delta airlines in the '90s decided to ban smoking. And a lot of people thought, wow, they're going to lose a lot of customers. But Delta airlines knew two things. They understood who of their customers didn't like smoking on flights and gave that feedback and that sentiment. And they also understood who their most profitable and frequent fliers were in the business side of the house.
Jennifer Morgan:
And so they knew that by banning smoking, they're going to retain those higher spending customers and likely attract customers from other airlines. And so initially when they made that announcement, everybody was like, well, that's crazy. You're going to lose business, but it actually had the opposite effect because they had the sentiment to understand my highest paying, most frequent flying business travelers prefer this. And so they were able to retain those customers, but attract new ones. And so that sentiment allowed them to make a very strategic business decision that they couldn't have made by just looking at the operational data alone or the sentiment data alone. It was the combination that allowed them to make a different decision.
Betty Liu:
So interesting. Let's talk a little bit about your management and leadership style.
Jennifer Morgan:
Okay.
Betty Liu:
One of the quotes I keep reading pop up that you have said in interviews is that you focus on the people and then the numbers will follow.
Jennifer Morgan:
Yes.
Betty Liu:
So what does that mean?
Jennifer Morgan:
So sometimes when you're going through tougher times in your career, times of change in management, you don't realize the lessons you're learning until you look back and take the time to really reflect on them. And so I remember that when I took a pretty big job leading the North American business of SAP, it was in 2014 and it was a time of a lot of change. We had made acquisitions. There was a lot of cultural change happening or were starting the shift to the Cloud. It was a lot, and it's a big business. And the competition spheres and you have quarterly numbers. And so you have all these current pressures of hitting numbers, hitting growth at scale. And you have to be able to, you can't sustain that unless the core is really healthy in a lot of different ways.
Jennifer Morgan:
And one of the things I found as I would do business reviews with the different leaders is I didn't give people a template. A lot of times in business, we give people templates and say, I'd like to have a review on this. Please give me the information in this way. And I found that, and I had learned that way, growing up in business in different places. I found that by asking people to take me through the business, it always helped me understand how they think based on how they would frame the information. They would typically always start with the numbers. And that's logical I understand that to an extent, but they would start with the numbers and typically focus in on the strengths of what was going really, really well. And then maybe like 10 slides in there would be an org chart with people on it.
Jennifer Morgan:
And as I learned, and as I listened and went through these reviews, I realized if we aren't focused on having the best talent possible, we can't run a company this at this scale with a really great leadership team just at the top. That to permeate down through the organization because I'm a big believer that you need to hire people who you think are better than you, smarter than you, different than you, because that in turn teaches them to do the same. And that lifts everybody up. Whereas if you're focused on hiring somebody who's, they're good enough for the job, because I need to fill the role that again permeates itself into the organization and it pulls everybody down. And so I found that approach really helped me understand how people thought about the business as a general manager versus just hitting numbers.
Jennifer Morgan:
And so I changed the approach and said, talk to me first about your people. And I tell you, buddy, it would be really interesting the people who could speak very thoughtfully about the people on their team, what their strengths were, what the areas were that they were working with them on. How the combination of those people, the tapestry of those people together created a great team dynamic. It was just very interesting to me how people would view that versus versus those who focused on numbers. And maybe just gave me an org chart. It was the people who could really talk through the strengths of that team and what it meant to the business and how they were developing the areas that needed to be developed and the areas that had bigger potential.
Betty Liu:
And that's fascinating. Did you find that ended up though being reflected in results?
Jennifer Morgan:
Nine times out of 10.
Betty Liu:
Okay.
Jennifer Morgan:
Nine times out of 10, I tell you it help me understand where I needed to dig into the numbers, where maybe something was being glossed over or maybe there was a bigger challenge and helping people understand, because again when you become a leader, a lot of times you're just thrown in and you understand intellectually you have to make certain numbers and you have budgets you have to make, and you're focused on hitting those because traditionally that's how we measure people's success.
Betty Liu:
Totally. We're data driven these days.
Jennifer Morgan:
We're data driven. But you have to help people understand that you have to put the time in, you have to nurture your talent because you can't do it alone. And I think it wasn't until I was in a situation where my business was so big. I could do everything perfectly. I could work 24 hours a day. I could make every decision perfectly, which I didn't by the way. But if I could do that, it wouldn't be enough. And it wouldn't be enough if my leaders were able to do that. And so when you help people understand your life is going to get a whole lot easier. You're going to be able to be strategic. If the business has a group of people who can manage the business in a sustainable way, you can think more forward thinking that way and think about what are the things you want to do versus just getting through each quarter.
Betty Liu:
Is there a big difference between managing a 1,000 people and a 100,00 people?
Jennifer Morgan:
Absolutely.
Betty Liu:
Okay.
Jennifer Morgan:
Absolutely. When I think about the first time you become a manager, I think that is where you learn a lot about leadership. You learn, I mean, I remember for me giving somebody critical feedback was really scary because it feels so personal. To when you're, you're managing maybe a smaller team, though you have probably closer relationships by nature of the size of the team. And that skill is very important in your career to be able to both give people feedback and ask for feedback. Leadership is a two way street. It's not just about giving feedback.
Betty Liu:
It's so big on feedback. Yeah.
Jennifer Morgan:
It's a best gift you can give somebody. And then I think when you become a second line leader, then you have to learn how to scale. So you have to figure out, all right, what's important for me to focus on and how do I get my strategy or my leadership style and the culture I want to create? How do I make that happen through other people? And that just becomes, greater and greater as you move up, which means the people come even more important because you want your people to be a reflection, their reflection of you.
Jennifer Morgan:
And the one thing that I always was amazed by, and I remember this as I was coming up the chain. You watch leaders, you watch everything that they do. You watch how they say things, how they look at people, you watch them when they're not on a stage. When they're not on a public display. I think leadership is about who you are when you think nobody's watching. When you're not public speaking, when you know cameras aren't on, when you know that you don't have an audience of people, that's those little moments are how people judge you. And when you have enough of those moments, those moments matter and they and multiply.
Betty Liu:
And they build on themselves.
Jennifer Morgan:
And that creates trust and that creates your reputation. And you show people the culture and you emulate the behavior you want on others to emulate. And so doing that takes time and you have to spend time doing that as a leader.
Betty Liu:
So was there a time when you got feedback as a leader and critical feedback that made you change.
Jennifer Morgan:
Yes. Oh my gosh. You kidding me? Yes. Oh gosh. Where do I begin? So I remember this one time, and this was so hard at the time. And this woman works for me today and so it is a great, it has a really happy ending. It was when I started to run, I was given a promotion to run all of our public sector business. And I had promoted a woman to run all of our federal, our defense, our civilian, and our aerospace business, which was a pretty big business. And so both of us were promoted into these roles.
Jennifer Morgan:
And because I had managed that business before, I knew a lot of the people, I had done things a certain way. People were used to working with me. I knew the customers. So I was still very, very engaged in the spirit of wanting to "help her." Let me help you, here's how I did it here, I said. And finally after three months, I remember a little frustrated, because I thought we should do things this way or that way. And she was phenomenal. I mean, she was one of the smartest people still that I know. She came into my office after three months and she said, "Jen, I can't be the leader that, and I can't lead exactly the way you want me to lead. I'm going to be different from you. And I can't do it under these circumstances. And so I'm going to take myself out of this because you want somebody and deserve somebody who's going to do it your way, your style. And I'm going to be different than that."
Jennifer Morgan:
And I remember at the time it was such a gut shot and I took it so personally. And you have a set of emotion of, you want to make it all about, oh, them versus me. And as I reflected on that and it took me some time, a couple things came to mind. One is she was right. I was smothering her and trying to "help her." I was being a helicopter manager.
Betty Liu:
She was feeling micromanaged.
Jennifer Morgan:
And I was micromanaging. And I wasn't giving her a chance to create her own identity. And in doing so, all the people just kept coming to me. And it wasn't because I was great or they needed me. It was because I was setting that tone and I was diminishing her ability to be a leader. Even if it meant she might have to learn a little along the way, even if it meant she might make a mistake, even if it meant she was going to do it to differently than me. As I reflected over that over time, I realized she was right.
Jennifer Morgan:
It took a lot of courage for her to do that. And she gave me that feedback very professionally and very thoughtfully. And it always stuck with me. And I always drawn that because when I go back to thinking, I'm trying to help somebody from my heart. I think I'm trying to help somebody I realize I have to let them be. And I remember in my own journey, when I was running North America, I had a boss, Rob Ensley, who at the time, he was always there for me if I needed him. If I called him day or night, always there, always calm to pressure, but he was never hovering around me in the stressful times ever. And I realized he was doing that for a reason because I needed to stumble. I needed to feel that I could learn. I could pick myself up and I could get through the tough times.
Jennifer Morgan:
I knew he was always there, but he wasn't standing next to me at all times. And so the combination of those experiences, both my own experience of being managed in a way that allowed me to grow and flourish and stumble along the way, as well as my experience of being a leader who didn't let somebody do that helped me understand how I could use feedback more effectively before it creates a problem. So I asked for feedback a lot, and I also acknowledge when I've messed up. And I think that's a very important thing to do. I think your credibility is a leader in being willing to be vulnerable is really important. Followership requires that.
Betty Liu:
Because nobody's perfect.
Jennifer Morgan:
Nobody is perfect.
Betty Liu:
And then you hold people accountable, you need to be accountable yourself.
Jennifer Morgan:
That's right.
Betty Liu:
I'm 100% on board with that. No, totally. And I wonder if some of what you've learned through the years, leading obviously getting the feedback, if that's what encouraged you to maybe start this podcast?
Jennifer Morgan:
It's funny you say that. So I never thought I would add podcast host to my resume and I'm like intimidated being here. This is amazing. The reason that I really thought about why am I doing this because there's lots of podcasts. There's lots of great content out there. And I wanted to give an opportunity for there's so many emerging leaders and there's going people who are in leadership roles and our roles 10 years before you and I were in these roles. The profile of talent, and this is a whole other we could do another podcast on this, how we think about talent and the profiles of those talent and how we think about disrupting those.
Betty Liu:
Yeah.
Jennifer Morgan:
I think that's something that businesses and companies, I think that's got to be something we focus son. So knowing that you're going to have emerging leaders taking on incredible leadership roles, you have CEOs of companies today, they're phenomenal who are in their 20s, in their 30s. Incredible intellect, incredible business sense, incredible passion, insight. But there's one thing that comes with having years and years of experience, you have time and you can't manufacture time, and you have a lot of experiences and a lot of mistakes along the way. And a lot of great things happen along the way. And so the combination of that time and experience is wisdom. And so for the podcast, I wanted it to be about people who were willing to come on and be very authentic in sharing their wisdom through their stories, through their screw ups, their successes in the hopes that can help, maybe provide and accelerate that wisdom in people whose careers are already going to be accelerated in an amazing way.
Betty Liu:
All the interviews you've done and you've done them with such great luminaries. So Richard Branson, I know Stacey Cunningham was on your podcast.
Jennifer Morgan:
Love her. She's amazing.
Betty Liu:
What's been one thing that you've learned from it that was surprising.
Jennifer Morgan:
So there were, there's a couple things. So Richard Branson was really interesting because if you think about how he's created these 400 plus companies that he has, back to what we talked about earlier around the experience gap, that's what he's made a business. That's what he's made an empire out of exploiting somebody else's experience gap in an industry, in a business. If you think about it.
Betty Liu:
That's so true.
Jennifer Morgan:
It's so true. I mean, and so experience management has been something, managing an experience. It's something that successful businesses have focused on for years. We just have technology to do it in a different way now. So Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is the president of StubHub, and she was one of my guests and she used the term operating range when she would talk about somebody's talent or their leadership abilities. And I love that term because we've all worked with people who we say, oh my gosh, this person is really great at strategy and big ideas and big thinking, and this person's really great on the execution or doing this piece of the business.
Jennifer Morgan:
And so a lot of times when you put together teams, you put together teams of people who bring those different nuggets to the table to create a whole of everything you need. When you find somebody who really has the ability to really stretch, maybe from a really strategic perspective, down to a very execution focused way is one example. That's defined as, she calls it an operating range, a broad operating range. And so when you find people who have these broad operating range, like that really struck with me because it verbalized what we all look for in great talent. People who can really stretch quite broadly in their abilities, because it's hard to find people who can do that really effectively. So I love that term operating range.
Betty Liu:
I'm sure you must get so many people calling you, asking you for advice. What's the one leadership lesson or leadership tip that you give people that they can take away and take some action on?
Jennifer Morgan:
Well, philosophically there's one thing I do say a lot and it means more now than when I first learned it and it was things are as never as good as they seem and things are never as bad as they seem. And what that means to me is when you're a leader and you make your first mistakes, they're very visible, and it feels like failure. And you obsess over it because it hurts. It stinks. And you feel like it's going to define you. And especially when you're earlier on in your career, and once you go through enough of those experiences, you realize the sun's still going to come out tomorrow, like figure out what you're going to take from it, grab onto that and make you better, and then let the rest go and move on.
Jennifer Morgan:
And it's hard to tell somebody, you have to build that muscle up over time, but things are never as bad as they seem. What really matters is what you do next. And on the flip side of that, things are never as good as they seem. When things are going great, when the numbers are great, when everything is going good in business, that can lead to complacency. It's very easy to say, things are great right now. I'm just going to, Ugh, I'm just going to take a breather because I never get the opportunity. That's when complacency sets it. We reported great earnings yesterday and we had an all hands after when we talked about you can't let complacency step into your mind in that moment. I'm most comfortable when I'm the most uncomfortable if that makes sense.
Jennifer Morgan:
So that's more a little bit more philosophical I'd say from an actionable perspective, I think it's really important to ask people for feedback because for some people it's very hard to tell you something constructively. We just did a board off site in Europe a couple weekends ago. And we had an amazing facilitator and he got us all talking about various aspects about the business. And then he had us do this exercise. We went outside and he had each of us pair up with every person, there's eight of us separately. So there would be, each of us would pair with each person differently and we would go on a walk for 10 minutes and we would tell the person, would've three things that we really love about you and that are real positive. And what are the three things that maybe you can improve upon.
Jennifer Morgan:
And that exercise was really amazing because it was done in a safe way, walking with somebody it's much easier to sit down and give somebody maybe tough feedback is hard to do when you're sit in front of somebody and looking into their eye, like, that's tough with somebody maybe you're not super close with, but when you walk with somebody, it feels fluid and people can take it in. And that exercise was fascinating, Betty, because after we did that with each person and we sat down and wrote down the three things that they sat on each side, what was amazing is at the end, it was all very, very consistent.
Jennifer Morgan:
And there were some things that were not a surprise and there were a few things that were, and so that exercise was a gift because it was so helpful for me to now understand that because they're just little things that I can do to tweak how I show up or how I behave. That will make all the difference in the world as to how it impacts others and is perceived by others and impacts the business. And so asking for feedback is just as is a leader, asking for feedback is just as important as giving feedback.
Betty Liu:
Jennifer, thank you so much. It great to have you in Slice.
Jennifer Morgan:
Oh my gosh. Thank you for having me. We can just talk forever.
Betty Liu:
I know.
Jennifer Morgan:
You've been wonderful and I'm learning a lot from, I'm ask for your feedback on what I can do better. Thank you for having me.
Betty Liu:
All right. Thank you, Jennifer.
Josh King:
Thanks so much for joining us inside the ICE house for a special uncut recording from the Slice episode with SAPs, Jennifer Morgan, which appeared on Cheddar and as part of Intercontinental Exchanges Insights that can be found at the ice.com/insights. And so that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Jennifer Morgan, president of SAP's Cloud business group. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at icehouse podcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Theresa DeLuca, with production assistance from Ken Abel and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified, neither ICE, nor is affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor approve or endorse any of the content hearing. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing here in constitution offered to sell. A solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length and clarity
