Published December 31, 2014 by NCG Strategic Marketing

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” That’s been a popular saying in Silicon Valley for some time, and it has a certain mystique because it’s attributed to the legendary business guru Peter Drucker. But exactly what does it mean, and could it be true? Could strategy be overrated? And how can culture possibly be so important?

—

And yet, sometimes the problem isn’t a bad or nonexistent strategy – it’s a bad culture. Jonathan Becher makes that point when he says, “In my experience a well-designed and well-implemented strategy cannot be effective unless people are motivated to support it.”

Click here to read the full article

Published December 29, 2014 by The Customer Edge

SAP recently joined the growing number of companies who have added this role to address the rising importance of digital in customers’ lives. A few weeks ago, our CMO, Jonathan Becher, was appointed as our first Chief Digital Officer.

I asked Jonathan to share his perspective on his new role and he said,  “To be successful, a chief digital officer must be both business and technology-savvy. The CDO spends less time worrying about what he/she owns, and more time helping the company realize a digital transformation by ignoring traditional business boundaries. A true CDO is an integrator and force multiplier across the company.”

Click here to read the full article

Published November 17, 2014 by SAP

WALLDORF — SAP SE, the world’s largest maker of business software, today announced that Jonathan Becher has been appointed as the company’s first Chief Digital Officer to lead the company’s new digital business unit with immediate effect.

Becher, a technology and marketing expert who joined SAP in 2007, will drive the new business unit to expand the company’s addressable market through entry into new areas such as content and data.

“Jonathan will not only be responsible for building a major new revenue stream for the company, he will also make Run Simple a reality for customers and consumers that engage with us digitally,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP.

Click here to read the full announcement

Published November 11, 2014 by SAP

Jonathan was a guest at the SAP TechEd && d-code Live Studio in Berlin. Dr. Alea Fairchild, Research Fellow, The Constantia Institute, interviewed Jonathan about the perils of business and technology complexity, as well as the power of simplicity.

Watch the interview

Published September 26, 2014 by Inc. 

SAP has undergone a big change over the last 5 years shifting focus from a product offering to thinking more about their customers changing needs. “We are taking an audience centric approach to everything we do,” says Jonathan Becher, CMO, SAP. For the uninitiated, SAP is a global leader in enterprise software with over 250,000 customers in 188 countries and more than 66,000 employees. Becher gave us his take on leadership.

1. Culture eats strategy for breakfast: “Many leaders ignore the value of a company’s culture. The best strategy in the world means nothing if you don’t have a culture to support it. We needed to stop ‘delegating up’ to our managers and instead learn to take responsibility,” says Becher.

2. Run marketing like a business: “I think ‘business first, marketing second.’ My mantra as CMO is that marketing should be run like a business, not just a division that supports a business.”

Click here to read the full interview

Published September 24, 2014 by Forbes

Published September 18, 2014 by Forbes

This week Infegy, a data-based company that helps bring clarity to social data, released a list of the top 50 CMOs by social influence. This list is based on their data analytics platform Infegy Atlas. Apparent when analyzing this list is that some CMOs are slow to adopting new mediums of communication in their own lives.

…

Rion Martin, Marketing Director at Infegy, explained the process of determining who is the most socially influential CMO: “When evaluating the top 50 CMOs by social influence, you must take into account several factors: indexed social interactions, shares, re-shares, mentions, sentiment of interactions, strength of your followers, and back links.”

Top 50 CMOs Ranked By Social Media Influence

10).  Jonathan Becher               SAP                 @jbecher

Click here to read the full article

Published September 17, 2014 by Social Media Marketing Magazine

These are the top 100 Chief Marketing Officers around the world who were active on Twitter as of September 15, 2014.

#13: Jonathan Becher
Chief Marketing Officer at SAP
www.Twitter.com/JBecher

Click here to read the entire list

Published September 11, 2014 by Fast Company 

We are approaching an historic transformation of what for thousands of years we have considered work: scavenging, hunting, laboring in fields, and later offices. Today we are seeing a punctuated equilibrium, a radical rethinking of what it means to be an employer or employed. Whichever you are now, your future is about to change.

Freelancers Dominate

According to Jonathan Becher, CMO of computer software company SAP, already up to half of all U.S. workers are freelancers. But they aren’t on the books, HR leaders don’t count them as employees, and they aren’t part of training and culture initiatives. That will need to change.

Click here to read the full article

Published August 28, 2014 by The Globe and Mail

Jonathan Becher, the Chief Marketing Officer for SAP, talks about the importance of workplace diversity for making a successful brand. He was interviewed as a part of the C2MTL Commerce and Creativity conference, a three-day event meant to spark visionary thinking in international business.

Click here to watch the video