Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [26]
Zia Yusuf was born in Pakistan and educated at Macalester College in Minnesota, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and international studies. With an interest in international development, he went to work for a firm doing development economics consulting and obtained a master’s degree from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Yusuf then joined the World Bank, where he did quite well, becoming a permanent staff member. However, the bank did not permit Yusuf to move to its private-sector arm, the International Financial Corporation, so on the advice of his wife, Yusuf decided to go back to business school to strengthen his private-sector credentials and get a second master’s degree. He obtained his MBA from Harvard in 1998 and went to work for Goldman Sachs, a position that leveraged his banking and economics background and was a common destination for HBS grads. Yusuf did well at Goldman and was particularly skilled at managing client relationships, but he did not enjoy the banking work.
The late 1990s was the height of the dot-com boom and a time of great excitement about Silicon Valley; many of Yusuf’s HBS classmates and Goldman Sachs associates were going west to pursue their careers. One of his colleagues from Harvard was a board assistant to Hasso Plattner, one of the cofounders of SAP. Yusuf, who had never even heard of SAP let alone knew what it did, flew to the Bay Area to talk to Plattner about a position in the company’s Palo Alto office. At the time, he thought this was a good way to transition to the area—SAP would pay for the move and he could get a better feeling of the Silicon Valley culture and opportunities at close range.
Yusuf’s first real job at SAP was as chief operating officer of the SAP Markets group, a separate legal entity wholly owned by SAP that had been established to build an electronic marketplace—an exchange that brought buyers and sellers together and made money by taking a small fee on each transaction. Other companies such as Commerce One were also pursuing this business model, which ultimately turned out not to be successful. Although the unit in SAP did develop some important software components used in other SAP product offerings, the 600-person operation was disbanded.
When SAP Markets closed down, Yusuf got the assignment to build an internal strategy consulting capability. Hiring talented people both from outside and from other units inside SAP, Yusuf built a department that had its hand in almost every high-level decision that required data collection and analysis—issues such as how to redo the human resources department, pricing questions, and organizational structure and design choices. The department, called the corporate consulting team (CCT), became the point of contact for managing any outside consultants SAP used. When Hasso Plattner became interested in user-centered design and design thinking, it was natural for Yusuf and his group to take the lead in making connections with IDEO, the award-winning product design firm, and with other outside resources that could help SAP build its user-centered design capability.
After four years as head of the CCT, a unit with offices in Germany and Palo Alto, Yusuf took on the job of consolidating and developing an ecosystem activity for the company, reporting to Leo Apotheker, who later became CEO. With favorable publicity for this activity in BusinessWeek,6 and with increasing revenues and products coming from partners and the developer and customer community that fell within the ecosystems domain, Yusuf had already accomplished quite a bit. Moreover,