Talk about your left brain/right brain balance: Kirsten Sutton, Managing Director of SAP Labs Canada, graduated from culinary school, holds degrees in Linguistics and Creative Writing/English and leads a national team of 1,600 people who design and build solutions that help businesses run better. In January, she received SAP’s Distinguished Leader Award, which acknowledges Kirsten’s exceptional leadership with her Canada Labs teams and within SAP Canada overall.
Kirsten: It’s the work to bridge the Lab organization and the Field organization that I’m most excited about. By that I mean getting our Developers in touch with our customers and, in turn, having our customers meet the people who have designed and built the solutions they use every day to help their business run better.
As a developer in the Labs, your work is often very specific and project based. Rarely do you get to see beyond the component you’re working on. But give them a chance to speak directly to a customer and listen to how they are using our products…it’s transformative. One developer described it this way:
“I was blown away by a lot of what I saw that day. It opened my eyes to how impressive and suitable purpose-built industry mobile apps are and how excited SAP customers are about using them.”
For our Field team, understanding that the Labs is another asset they can bring to the table to create a unique customer experience, gives them that edge to make a bigger, faster or more meaningful sale and ultimately a stronger relationship with our customers.
Everything for me always comes back to food. It’s like the dynamics in a restaurant. The Lab is like the kitchen: people don’t often see the team producing the fantastic product they are enjoying. The Field, is like the front of house, filled with servers, bartenders—people you always see. But on that rare and special occasion, there’s that moment when the Chef walks out into the dining area and greets everyone and it all comes together to create a totally unique experience. That experience is what I’m excited about making happen. Everyone benefits – it’s good for our Labs employees, our Field team and for our customers.
Kirsten: People see me dressed up every year for Halloween but are usually shocked when I tell them I made my costume myself. And I don’t just make them for me, but my whole family. Every Halloween for about the last eight years I’ve made costumes based on a theme of some kind. For instance one year we were dressed up like characters from Alice in Wonderland; another year it was The Incredibles and then The Little Mermaid. This year we’re going to be Merida, Queen Elinor and King Fergus from the movie Brave
I don’t know why I like to do it! <laughs> Maybe it’s the challenge. One year my daughter said ‘I want to be SpongeBob for Halloween’ and right away I started to think ‘Hmmm, how am I going to do that’.
Angela: As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Kirsten: This is a hard one, because it would change; there are a few moments in time. Let’s start with when I was really little, maybe four-years-old. I wanted to be a gift wrapper like you see at the mall. Then when I was a bit older, I was constantly rearranging the furniture in my bedroom. I was about ten and that was when I wanted to be an Interior Designer. Finally in high school I decided to become a Chef, trained for it and worked in the industry for several years, to help pay for university, actually. I secretly still want to be a novelist, tv sitcom writer and a professional poker player, but those are going to have to wait for retirement…
Angela: What are some of your passions and hobbies that you enjoy outside of the office?
Kirsten: Food for sure and there’s a story I have about combining your passion and your work. Our office in Vancouver was the only SAP Lab office without a food program (cafeteria or otherwise). So people either brown bag it or eat at any one of the 75 or so restaurants in our neighbourhood. So when it came time to look at options on implementing a program, I saw a big opportunity.
We worked with the local Business Improvement Association and created Lunch on Us—a reloadable card that only SAP employees can use at 42 restaurants (we started with 12) – so now our neighbourhood restaurants are our cafeteria. Our team took it one step further and created an app for it as well. So, for instance, you can shake your iPhone to choose a place to eat, which I’m always doing; it’s linked into twitter feeds; it can tell you how long the line-ups are and even tell you what your average spend needs to be if you want to stretch your budget to the end of the quarter. [NA News note: With the success of Vancouver’s ‘Lunch on Us’, SAP Labs Toronto recently rolled out a similar program.]Angela: If you could have dinner with anyone, living or not, who would it be and why?
Kirsten: You know, as a trained chef this question always puts me into a cold sweat! It’s the idea of having to choose one person. How about three? I’d start with King Tut. I’m fascinated with Egyptian history and I’d love to find out the real story about how he died. Next would be one of my all-time favourite writers, Shakespeare. He did some of the best writing—even some of the best insults! I think it’d be a lot of fun to share some wine and listen to him make fun of people he didn’t like. I’d ask all kinds of questions and get to the bottom of the did-he-write-all-that mystery. And third, I’m wavering between Julia Child and Jamie Oliver. But I’d choose Jamie. I’ve been cooking a lot of his meals lately.
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