SAP S/4HANA Condensed: What CXOs Actually Need to Know with Prashant Pimplekar and Tanay Sarpotdar

Thank you, Tanay.

Thanks a lot.

Wonderful.

It's great to have you here.

Um, so let me start somewhere slightly different.

Today, if you tell someone you're writing a book, they might ask whether you have considered turning it into a LinkedIn carousel first.

We, we, we're living in a age of two-minute reels, right? So AI-generated summaries and these are becoming increasingly compressed, and they are also compressing the attention spans.

And yet, and yet, Prashant, you've decided to write a 250-page book on SAP S/4HANA.

But this isn't actually where your writing journey started, right? You've been writing for years, including articles going back into the 1990s, and you've written extensively across technology, management, and governance.

So, so take us back to the beginning.

What made you go from being a reader and a writer to saying, "I think I have a book in me"? And why did SAP S/4HANA become that book?

Thanks, Tanay.

Uh, l-l-- I had to go back in the past.

So in my school days, I, I was a voracious reader.

I read a lot, right from modern novels, short stories, biographies, poems, et cetera.

My reading expanded further in my engineering and MBA days, right from pulp fictions, P.G. Wodehouse, Jeffrey Archer, Peter Drucker, and many more management books.

In the meantime, I had begun writing also.

To begin with, variety articles, poems.

But my first article, ERP: The Viable Solution, got published in Times of India in its Ascent supplement way back in 1996.

I had just joined a consulting company for SAP, and my article tried to promote the awareness of ERP.

In 2004, my article, Can India Ever Be a Developed Country?, was published on Reddit.com, and it received huge response, lots of bouquets and brickbats.

It was much before the social media boom and much before the birth of the word viral.

You know what I mean.

[chuckles]

So this article truly made me aware of my potential of writing something serious.

Thank you, Tanay.

Thanks a lot.

Wonderful.

It's great to have you here.

Um, so let me start somewhere slightly different.

Today, if you tell someone you're writing a book, they might ask whether you have considered turning it into a LinkedIn carousel first.

We, we, we're living in a age of two-minute reels, right? So AI-generated summaries and these are becoming increasingly compressed, and they are also compressing the attention spans.

And yet, and yet, Prashant, you've decided to write a 250-page book on SAP S/4HANA.

But this isn't actually where your writing journey started, right? You've been writing for years, including articles going back into the 1990s, and you've written extensively across technology, management, and governance.

So, so take us back to the beginning.

What made you go from being a reader and a writer to saying, "I think I have a book in me"? And why did SAP S/4HANA become that book?

Thanks, Tanay.

Uh, l-l-- I had to go back in the past.

So in my school days, I, I was a voracious reader.

I read a lot, right from modern novels, short stories, biographies, poems, et cetera.

My reading expanded further in my engineering and MBA days, right from pulp fictions, P.G. Wodehouse, Jeffrey Archer, Peter Drucker, and many more management books.

In the meantime, I had begun writing also.

To begin with, variety articles, poems.

But my first article, ERP: The Viable Solution, got published in Times of India in its Ascent supplement way back in 1996.

I had just joined a consulting company for SAP, and my article tried to promote the awareness of ERP.

In 2004, my article, Can India Ever Be a Developed Country?, was published on Reddit.com, and it received huge response, lots of bouquets and brickbats.

It was much before the social media boom and much before the birth of the word viral.

You know what I mean.

[chuckles]

So this article truly made me aware of my potential of writing something serious.