SAP CEO on what he gained and lost in freak accident

"Leaders would be forgiven for a lot of things. But never for a lack of vision," says Bill McDermott, the Newtown Square-based chief executive of the business-software giant SAP, after losing his eye. "It has taught me a lot about character," as he "willed" himself through pain back to his punishing, exhilarating global schedule, and about the generous, focused professionals who helped him rebuild his life, McDermott told me Friday. "I have, from seeing a whole different way of looking at the world, gained vision and insight."

McDermott, an ex-Xerox salesman who has retooled his 75,000-employee company for the cloud-computing and iPad era and is aggressively challenging the old enterprises software model with Hana in-memory systems, says he cut his face badly in a freak accident while visiting his father down South to mark the elder McDermott's 76th birthday, on the July 4 weekend.

I told him that readers of the first item I wrote were asking how such a thing could happen. "People have a fascination with other people's trauma. That's understandable," McDermott told me. A Roman Catholic, McDermott feels "closer to God now," accepting a kind of divine balance between his loss and his gain.  Read more on the SAP CEO's hurt and recovery in my column in today's Philadelphia Inquirer here.