SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott has an amazing "first job" story.

He bought a business at age 16, a Long Island delicatessen—and he borrowed $5,500 to do it, he told an audience at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley last week, reports Eric Savitz at Forbes.

After buying the deli, he had to get all the neighborhood kids to ignore the local 7-Eleven and buy stuff from his store instead. So he let them buy on credit. He also delivered food to homebound seniors.

Then he struck up a partnership with a video-game company to add games to the store in a separate room, splitting the take with his partner. In a few months, the games paid off his store.

He eventually sold the store and bought his parents a beach house.

He doesn't even consider his stint as a retail entrepreneur his first real job. That would be his 17 years at Xerox, he said. He's had a stellar career since he joined SAP since 2002, becoming the first American to hold the CEO title at the German software company. He's been sharing the job with another non-German, Jim Hagemann Snabe since February 2010. (Snabe is from Denmark.)

They took over after the previous CEO, Léo Apotheker, was shown the door. And SAP has been rolling along ever since, introducing its most successful product ever, the Hana database, and spending billions on SuccessFactors and Ariba to plunge headlong into cloud computing.

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SAP has been on a tear of late, re-energized by the popularity of its hot in-memory database, Hana, and its aggressive plan to (finally) become a major player in cloud computing.

Now CEO Bill McDermott just revealed a huge new goal for the company: It wants to have 1 billion users of its technology by 2015. So Bill McDermott told attendees at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley last week, reports Eric Savitz at Forbes.

To do that, SAP would essentially need to more than double the current number of users it has now, an SAP spokesperson confirms.

The 1 billion number "includes all the people who would touch an SAP system," we were told.

This means all the employees at companies using SAP enterprise software and its new database. It also includes all the employees at companies that use its recently acquired cloud services, including SuccessFactors and Ariba, and other tech, like the homes served by utilities whose smart meters feed data into SAP systems.

It also includes mobile device users whose mobile carrier uses SMS messaging systems from Sybase, an SAP subsidiary.

To get there, SAP is investing like mad. It is spending billions acquiring cloud companies like SuccessFactors ($3.4 billion, closed in February) and Ariba ($4.3 billion, a deal announced in May). It's also set aside a half a billion dollars to fund the adoption of its Hana database, including a $155 million fund for startups writing big data apps using Hana.

At least some of these investments are starting to pan out. Hana is on track to book $500 million a year in revenues, McDermott also said. That's the most successful SAP product of all time, its creator told Business Insider.

It could also do well with the cloud, after previous attempts like homegrown offering ByDesign floundered. But now SAP has got SuccessFactors founder Lars Dalgaard helping it compete in cloud-based services.

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Enterprise software company SAP has a big hit on its hands with its in-memory database software, HANA.

Co-CEO, Bill McDermott, tells AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldahl:

"We have 1,000 customers on it now, so it’s growing really fast. The last update we gave, we indicated that we think it could be a half billion US dollar business which would make it the fastest growing software product in the history of the world."

It's a bit hyperbolic to say it's the fastest growing software of all time. (iOS, Windows 8, Android, come to mind as potentially bigger software products. Maybe he's talking enterprise?)

But, it is true that HANA has grown very fast. It's been on the market for about 18 months. At 1,000 customers, that's double the number of customers SAP reported in October, when it said HANA had 500.

It's also true that there are still plenty of SAP customers left to sell HANA to. It was only last week that SAP announced its core applications, called Business Suite, could now run on HANA.

SAP obviously hopes that its Business Suite customers will ditch their current database (often from Oracle, but also from IBM and Microsoft) and buy HANA instead. HANA is a new type of database that runs a lot faster. It can process information in seconds that used to take hours or days. A retailer, for instance, can now see which products are being sold across all stores in real time.

But, SAP may not be able to keep selling HANA to its current customers so fast, Wall Street analysts at Ovum say. It's not an easy thing to yank out the database that runs your company and replace it with another.

They wrote in a research note:

"Convincing customers that the 'transformative' benefits of Suite on HANA will be non-disruptive technically is the challenge SAP faces with an entrenched Business Suite customer base. Companies don't swap out their database and ERP investments overnight.”

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With cloud companies and services gaining more popularity, it is only a matter of time before enterprise technology transitions to the cloud as well.

Bill McDermott, co-CEO of enterprise software company SAP, says that he is not concerned with the buzzed-about cloud startups that have emerged in recent years.

"If you looked at our quarterly results, cloud was up 385% year over year, and a lot of those wins were against the 'best of breed' cloud  providers," McDermott said. "When you talk to large complex companies they want the cloud, but they want the cloud in the form they are interested in."

Watch below as McDermott discusses the future of cloud for enterprise with Business Insider editor-in-chief Henry Blodget.

SEE ALSO: Zuckerberg Confidant Says Facebook Users Are Going To 'Get Bored,' Unless ...

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The biggest names in enterprise software and database solutions, SAP and Oracle, are constantlythrowingjabsat each other.

SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott stopped by our office recently, and talked about the ongoing race between the giants in the enterprise resource planning market.

"We are looking in the windshield at where we need to take SAP, not so much debating why we are or aren't better than Oracle," said McDermott.

"We know we are better. We know we are ahead. Now, the question is how we can continue to innovate faster, and help that customer win."

Watch below McDermott explain how SAP's integrated application platform is driving business results, and how Oracle has moved away from the core software mission.

SEE ALSO: Here's Why Cloud Startups Are Not A Threat To Enterprise Software Giants Like Oracle And SAP

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What does the future hold for enterprise IT?

Are we in a huge paradigm shift where companies like Salesforce will emerge as leaders?

SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott says that the future of his industry is innovation-based and software-led.

"To the extent that you have the arsenal of assets in the private, the public, and the combination of those two clouds, and you can still deal with complex, large, multinational companies on premise, and do all these things, with the continuous flow of innovation, you've got a great chance of winning the game," McDermott said in an interview with Business Insider editor-in-chief Henry Blodget.

"If you are tethered to hardware, high value services that customers don't have an interested in, that cost too much money and take too much time, or you are just selling commodities and IT that people don't value because it doesn't move the needle, there is a very good chance that you might not be around in three to five years," he said. 

Watch below McDermott explain how SAP is partnering with companies dabbling in enterprise IT projects to explore new paths for innovation.

SEE ALSO: SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott Clears The Air On The Ongoing Fight With Oracle

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Today's advice comes from Bill McDermott, co-Chief Executive of SAP, via The New York Times:

"I always try to hire somebody who’s got a vision at least as big as mine. The main question I ask is, what do you want? If you ask somebody what they want, you’ll know everything there is to know about them. We’re looking for people who have a clarity about who they are and what they want, and where they want to go."

McDemott says hires should have a keen understanding of how the job fits into their personal passions. While talent, bandwidth, acumen and intellectual curiosity are all important elements to have, McDermott says it is even more important that they really want the job and all challenges that come with it. Once the desire is there, the company can then provide the resources to make it happen.

"You need people who have a sense of urgency and passion, and they come in with a desire and a stated goal, they have a point of view, and they’re looking for some support because they’ve got a game to win. That’s what I want."

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SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott took the plunge and joined Twitter this week and he's taking to social networking like an old pro.

His first tweet was a cheerful hello that expertly included the #SAP hashtag. 

And that made his second tweet hilarious.

Apparently, SAP employees found him and he was inundated, not with tweets, but with emails welcoming him to Twitter and alerting him of followers. He saw his inbox fill up and thought there was some sort of catastrophe in the company.

@pixelbase Hope you tolerate me, too! Had 350 emails by 6am; wondered if biz issue but happy to see warm welcome from friends. Thx all!

— Bill McDermott (@BillRMcDermott) August 27, 2013

With that second tweet and a total of seven this week, he also instantly out-tweeted archrival Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, who joined Twitter in June, 2012, and has since sent only one. And that was a dis of SAP.

McDermott's tweets have been far friendlier, including a shout-out to Fantasy Football and Martin Luther King Jr.

Ellison managed to attract 40,000 follows to his single tweet. Ellison admits that Facebook is more his style. (His Facebook profile is not public).

In a few days, McDermott has attracted about 1,000 followers, so he still has a ways to go to beat Ellison on that count, but if he keeps up the action, he surely will.

SEE ALSO: The Business App 50: The Best Apps To Help You Do Your Job

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Most people know Bill McDermott as the CEO of SAP, a member of the 1%, earning $9.6 million in 2013.

But he didn't start out that way. He was born to a working class family in Long Island, full of love, setbacks, and heartbreak.

McDermott has poured out his whole amazing life story in a new book, "Winners Dream." The book is part memoir and part business strategy.

He hopes his story will not just inspire other hard-working youths, but show them how to do the same.

"I'm still the same guy I was in Long Island," he told us in his thick Long Island accent that gives that some credence. "Nothing has changed in terms of who I am as a person. What motivates me is to remain humble and second, to stay hungry."

Still, how he got here is a pretty awe-inspiring journey involving:

• being the grandson of basketball great Bobby McDermott (who back in the day, was paid around $4 a game), and who died from wounds suffered in a car crash at 49.  ("I never knew my grandfather," McDermott says.)
  
• growing up in a home so rickety that the floors flooded every time it rained. Still, his parents loved it until it burned to the ground when McDermott was a child.
• the death of his 5-year-old baby brother when McDermott was 7.
• a street fight at age 11 that ended when McDermott stuck a pencil in the boy's cheek.
• also at age 11, growing his paper rout into an uber-successful multi-product business (newspapers, greeting cards, cookies ...)
• At 16, buying the neighborhood deli by borrowing all the money. He talked the owner and suppliers into revenue-sharing agreements. The deli put him through college.
• getting his big break for a sales job at Xerox by convincing the manager to hire him that same day. To this day McDermott pays it forward by giving others their big breaks, he says.
• getting another big break in the form of a "promotion" that meant a pay cut, moving his family to the worst performing district, Puerto Rico, a location so marginally unsafe, McDermott landed in the emergency room from sand fleas. He turned it into the best-performing district (and learned to stop scratching).
  
• supporting his wife through breast cancer. Cancer would later claim the life of his mother.
  

Throughout all this, the essence of McDermott's story is: Work hard. Treat all the people in your life with love and respect. Keep a positive attitude no matter what life throws at you.

Business Insider: You wrote with touching openness about your wife, Julie's, breast cancer, about juggling a home life with two boys and a new job while your wife was in treatment. Can you describe that period in your life?

Bill McDermott: Shortly after leaving [my secure job] at Xerox, we found out that Julie had cancer. We had the big house on hill in Connecticut. We were brand new to the neighborhood. I had a brand-new global job at Gartner and my wife was sick with cancer. She had six months of chemo. But my job to still to go be global president of Gartner. I was blessed with a brave wife. Julie probably did more than any other wife under the circumstances. My mom and dad were on Long Island, so if I was on the road, my mom would stay.

BI: Years later, your mom died of cancer, too. How did that affect you?

BM: It affects everything, in the sense of my having empathy for other people. I also launched the Kathleen McDermott Foundation for pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is one of those cancers that doesn't get much attention unlike breast cancer, where they've made major strides.  A lot of people take it for granted that a pancreatic cancer is a one-way trip out of this world. We're doing more research that could significantly [help find treatments].

BI: You came from a working-class family and now you are a member of the 1%. What do you think about income inequality debate that says the deck is stacked against the poor?

BM: The main thing is everybody deserves an opportunity. I knew the day I went on [that job interview] at Xerox, I was fighting for my life. Let's say I didn’t get the job at Xerox, my life would have been different. Maybe I would not have wound up in the 1%.

But I would have worked my way to something. I wouldn’t have left my life’s journey to chance. I out hustled. You got to put yourself in a position to succeed. If you don’t get your first break, you've got to try again. And even if I wasn’t part of the 1% now, I would have found honor in my work.

BI: You work for an internationally renowned billionaire, Hasso Plattner, who is as known for his philanthropy fighting HIV/AIDS as he is for cofounding SAP. How has that influenced you?

BM: I'm lucky that I have Hasso, who is a living legend, that is still chairman of our supervisory board. When you think about Bill Gates or Steve Jobs you can’t leave Hasso Plattner out of that equation, one of the greatest tech visionaries. [He created the financial planning software industry.]

I learned that you can be a billionaire and an extremely humble man. His mind is not complicated with a lot things that don’t matter. People can have a lot of success and also be the same person after they have all the success.

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German software maker SAP will remain an independent company in the long term, its chief executive told a German newspaper.

"I believe so, absolutely," Bill McDermott told weekly Euro am Sonntag in an interview published on Saturday.

"The best way for a company to stay independent is to grow and to have a good market capitalization," he added.

With a market capitalization of 70.5 billion euros ($86.6 billion), SAP is the fifth-largest company in Germany's large cap DAX index.

SAP had held talks about a potential merger with software giant Microsoft in 2004 but discussions were scrapped because of the complexity of any deal and the subsequent integration of the companies.

($1 = 0.8140 euro)

(Reporting by Christoph Steitz; editing by Susan Thomas)

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Several weeks ago, SAP CEO Bill McDermott, who now lives in Germany, was visiting his brother in the US.

He got up in the middle of the night to get a drink and while carrying his glass of water, tripped and fell down the stairs.

He shattered his cheekbone, sliced his eye socket and cut the nerves of his left eye.

He laid there unconscious and "almost bled to death," SAP cofounder and chairman Hasso Plattner told German publication Wirtschafts Woche.

Fortunately, someone did find him.

But he lost his left eye in the accident.

McDermott has already talked to Sueddeutsche Zeitung, another German media outlet, about the accident. He said such a thing "can happen to anyone" and that the lesson is that "it's important to stand back up again, if you fall down."

He also says that the most important thing is "I'm still alive."

He's been working through his recovery and is expected return to SAP's headquarters in Germany when doctors to allow him to fly in October.

A SAP spokesperson told Business Insider:

In July, SAP informed employees that CEO Bill McDermott sustained an injury at a relative’s house. Unfortunately, we have recently learned that as a result of the injury, Bill lost his left eye. However, during this time his ability to lead SAP was never affected. Bill is expected in Germany next month where he will meet customers and employees. We wish him a speedy recovery.

McDermott's horrific accident is another chapter in a rather epic life, which he wrote about in a book last year. He worked his way out of poverty and up the ranks to run the SAP one of the world's largest software companies. 

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Europe's biggest software company SAP on Tuesday said it could top full-year financial targets in the fourth quarter, its most important period of the year, as it confirmed the strong third-quarter results it pre-announced last week.

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About a year ago, Alex Atzberger, 39, was promoted to president of SAP Ariba, a procurement cloud service that SAP bought for $4.3 billion in 2012. 

It was a shining moment in one of the most amazing career stories we've ever heard.

He started by dissing SAP to Clay Christensen

While Atzberger was in grad school at Harvard in 2005, he took a class from Clay Christensen (the famous author of "The Innovator's Dilemma"). He wrote a paper that argued that a tiny, little-known company at the time called Salesforce.com, was going to eat SAP's lunch. He said that Salesforce was focusing in an area that SAP was overlooking at the time, cloud computing (although it wasn't called cloud computing back then).

"That paper got me to SAP," Atzberger tells Business Insider. 

Christensen, who knew SAP's co-CEO at the time, Jim Hagemann Snabe, was impressed enough to give the paper to Hagemann. And Hagemann was intrigued enough that SAP recruiters soon started calling him.

At first, Atzberger wasn't interested in a job at SAP. He wanted to go to a startup.

But he changed his mind when he realized that the "bigger challenge" was getting access to SAP's 250,000 customers and "moving them forward," he says.

So he took an entry-level position in SAP's business analysis department, and began toiling away in relative obscurity, crafting plans to move SAP into new markets.

On July 4, 2007, everything changed for him.  

While Atzberger's coworkers were all out at barbecues and beach parties for the 4th of July, he was working in the empty office. Not born in the US, he had no family to hang with.

He wasn't completely alone. Bill McDermott was also there. McDermott, who had joined the company a few years earlier to run its US operations, had recently been appointed to SAP's Executive Board. (SAP is ruled via an oligarchy, by its all-powerful Executive Board.)

McDermott was roaming around the empty office "looking for someone to help him with a PowerPoint presentation." McDermott wanted to tell the board "the story of how we are going to turn sales around," Atzberger remembers. 

McDermott spied Atzberger and roped him in to helping. Atzberger spent the whole holiday weekend doing this presentation for the boss. When he finished, he thought he'd never hear from McDermott again.

But after McDermott gave the presentation, he called Atzberger on the phone, thrilled. "Alex, I want all my future presentations to the board be done by you," he said. 

"He didn't care who I was working for, or what my job was at the time," Atzberger laughs.

So this junior business analyst, filled with strategy ideas, now had a direct access to one of the most powerful men in the company.

Naturally, Atzberger's career took off after that. He went to Japan and China, helping SAP grow in those markets, eventually becoming a senior VP in China.

That's when McDermott called again

"I was in Shanghai boarding a flight when Bill called me up and he asked me to become his chief of staff," he says. Again, he almost didn't do it. It sounded like a staff role when he aspired to run a business unit.

But, it's hard to say no to McDermott, so he took the job and "it was really good," he says. He learned a lot about running a company while he traveled the world with McDermott, who had become sole CEO by then.

"Then we did the acquisition of Concur," Atzberger remembers. SAP bought Concur, a cloud expense management company, for $8.3 billion in December 2014.

During the process, Atzberger got to know Concur Technologies CEO Steve Singh.

The three men were taking a long international flight together discussing plans to integrate Concur into the company.

Atzberger was asked his thoughts about the strategy and about his career goals. He thought he was about to be offered a right-hand-man job with Singh at Concur, like a COO job, to give Singh a SAP insider.

Instead, McDermott offered him the top spot at Ariba. Ariba's top executives had left SAP a few months earlier. 

Aspiration achieved. He was now running his own multi-million business unit. (SAP doesn't report Ariba's revenues, but says it is growing. It was generating about $444 million in 2011.)

And all because a young Alex Atzberger spent a lonely holiday weekend working.

 "I was fairly lucky," he says.

SEE ALSO: 26 Oracle rock-star engineers changing the company

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SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott has an amazing "first job" story.

He bought a business at age 16, a Long Island delicatessen—and he borrowed $5,500 to do it, he told an audience at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley last week, reports Eric Savitz at Forbes.

After buying the deli, he had to get all the neighborhood kids to ignore the local 7-Eleven and buy stuff from his store instead. So he let them buy on credit. He also delivered food to homebound seniors.

Then he struck up a partnership with a video-game company to add games to the store in a separate room, splitting the take with his partner. In a few months, the games paid off his store.

He eventually sold the store and bought his parents a beach house.

He doesn't even consider his stint as a retail entrepreneur his first real job. That would be his 17 years at Xerox, he said. He's had a stellar career since he joined SAP since 2002, becoming the first American to hold the CEO title at the German software company. He's been sharing the job with another non-German, Jim Hagemann Snabe since February 2010. (Snabe is from Denmark.)

They took over after the previous CEO, Léo Apotheker, was shown the door. And SAP has been rolling along ever since, introducing its most successful product ever, the Hana database, and spending billions on SuccessFactors and Ariba to plunge headlong into cloud computing.

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SAP has been on a tear of late, re-energized by the popularity of its hot in-memory database, Hana, and its aggressive plan to (finally) become a major player in cloud computing.

Now CEO Bill McDermott just revealed a huge new goal for the company: It wants to have 1 billion users of its technology by 2015. So Bill McDermott told attendees at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley last week, reports Eric Savitz at Forbes.

To do that, SAP would essentially need to more than double the current number of users it has now, an SAP spokesperson confirms.

The 1 billion number "includes all the people who would touch an SAP system," we were told.

This means all the employees at companies using SAP enterprise software and its new database. It also includes all the employees at companies that use its recently acquired cloud services, including SuccessFactors and Ariba, and other tech, like the homes served by utilities whose smart meters feed data into SAP systems.

It also includes mobile device users whose mobile carrier uses SMS messaging systems from Sybase, an SAP subsidiary.

To get there, SAP is investing like mad. It is spending billions acquiring cloud companies like SuccessFactors ($3.4 billion, closed in February) and Ariba ($4.3 billion, a deal announced in May). It's also set aside a half a billion dollars to fund the adoption of its Hana database, including a $155 million fund for startups writing big data apps using Hana.

At least some of these investments are starting to pan out. Hana is on track to book $500 million a year in revenues, McDermott also said. That's the most successful SAP product of all time, its creator told Business Insider.

It could also do well with the cloud, after previous attempts like homegrown offering ByDesign floundered. But now SAP has got SuccessFactors founder Lars Dalgaard helping it compete in cloud-based services.

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Enterprise software company SAP has a big hit on its hands with its in-memory database software, HANA.

Co-CEO, Bill McDermott, tells AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldahl:

"We have 1,000 customers on it now, so it’s growing really fast. The last update we gave, we indicated that we think it could be a half billion US dollar business which would make it the fastest growing software product in the history of the world."

It's a bit hyperbolic to say it's the fastest growing software of all time. (iOS, Windows 8, Android, come to mind as potentially bigger software products. Maybe he's talking enterprise?)

But, it is true that HANA has grown very fast. It's been on the market for about 18 months. At 1,000 customers, that's double the number of customers SAP reported in October, when it said HANA had 500.

It's also true that there are still plenty of SAP customers left to sell HANA to. It was only last week that SAP announced its core applications, called Business Suite, could now run on HANA.

SAP obviously hopes that its Business Suite customers will ditch their current database (often from Oracle, but also from IBM and Microsoft) and buy HANA instead. HANA is a new type of database that runs a lot faster. It can process information in seconds that used to take hours or days. A retailer, for instance, can now see which products are being sold across all stores in real time.

But, SAP may not be able to keep selling HANA to its current customers so fast, Wall Street analysts at Ovum say. It's not an easy thing to yank out the database that runs your company and replace it with another.

They wrote in a research note:

"Convincing customers that the 'transformative' benefits of Suite on HANA will be non-disruptive technically is the challenge SAP faces with an entrenched Business Suite customer base. Companies don't swap out their database and ERP investments overnight.”

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With cloud companies and services gaining more popularity, it is only a matter of time before enterprise technology transitions to the cloud as well.

Bill McDermott, co-CEO of enterprise software company SAP, says that he is not concerned with the buzzed-about cloud startups that have emerged in recent years.

"If you looked at our quarterly results, cloud was up 385% year over year, and a lot of those wins were against the 'best of breed' cloud  providers," McDermott said. "When you talk to large complex companies they want the cloud, but they want the cloud in the form they are interested in."

Watch below as McDermott discusses the future of cloud for enterprise with Business Insider editor-in-chief Henry Blodget.

SEE ALSO: Zuckerberg Confidant Says Facebook Users Are Going To 'Get Bored,' Unless ...

Join the conversation about this story »

The biggest names in enterprise software and database solutions, SAP and Oracle, are constantlythrowingjabsat each other.

SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott stopped by our office recently, and talked about the ongoing race between the giants in the enterprise resource planning market.

"We are looking in the windshield at where we need to take SAP, not so much debating why we are or aren't better than Oracle," said McDermott.

"We know we are better. We know we are ahead. Now, the question is how we can continue to innovate faster, and help that customer win."

Watch below McDermott explain how SAP's integrated application platform is driving business results, and how Oracle has moved away from the core software mission.

SEE ALSO: Here's Why Cloud Startups Are Not A Threat To Enterprise Software Giants Like Oracle And SAP

Join the conversation about this story »

What does the future hold for enterprise IT?

Are we in a huge paradigm shift where companies like Salesforce will emerge as leaders?

SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott says that the future of his industry is innovation-based and software-led.

"To the extent that you have the arsenal of assets in the private, the public, and the combination of those two clouds, and you can still deal with complex, large, multinational companies on premise, and do all these things, with the continuous flow of innovation, you've got a great chance of winning the game," McDermott said in an interview with Business Insider editor-in-chief Henry Blodget.

"If you are tethered to hardware, high value services that customers don't have an interested in, that cost too much money and take too much time, or you are just selling commodities and IT that people don't value because it doesn't move the needle, there is a very good chance that you might not be around in three to five years," he said. 

Watch below McDermott explain how SAP is partnering with companies dabbling in enterprise IT projects to explore new paths for innovation.

SEE ALSO: SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott Clears The Air On The Ongoing Fight With Oracle

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Today's advice comes from Bill McDermott, co-Chief Executive of SAP, via The New York Times:

"I always try to hire somebody who’s got a vision at least as big as mine. The main question I ask is, what do you want? If you ask somebody what they want, you’ll know everything there is to know about them. We’re looking for people who have a clarity about who they are and what they want, and where they want to go."

McDemott says hires should have a keen understanding of how the job fits into their personal passions. While talent, bandwidth, acumen and intellectual curiosity are all important elements to have, McDermott says it is even more important that they really want the job and all challenges that come with it. Once the desire is there, the company can then provide the resources to make it happen.

"You need people who have a sense of urgency and passion, and they come in with a desire and a stated goal, they have a point of view, and they’re looking for some support because they’ve got a game to win. That’s what I want."

Join the conversation about this story »