In a surprising move, SAP ended its co-CEO experiment yesterday when the company announced Jennifer Morgan will be exiting stage left on April 30th, leaving Christian Klein as the lone CEO.
The pair took over at the end of last year when Bill McDermott left the company to become CEO at ServiceNow, and it looked like SAP was following Oracle’s model of co-CEOs, which had Safra Catz and Mark Hurd sharing the job for several years before Hurd passed away last year.
SAP indicated that Morgan and the board came to a mutual decision, and that it felt that it would be better moving forward with a single person at the helm. The company made it sound like going with a single CEO was always in the plans, and they were just speeding up the time table, but it feels like it might have been a bit more of a board decision and a bit less Morgan, as these things tend to go.
“More than ever, the current environment requires companies to take swift, determined action which is best supported by a very clear leadership structure. Therefore, the decision to transfer from Co-CEO to sole CEO model was taken earlier than planned to ensure strong, unambiguous steering in times of an unprecedented crisis,” the company wrote in a statement announcing the change.
The move also means that the company is moving away from having a woman at the helm, something that’s unfortunately still rare in tech. Why the company decided to move on from the shared role isn’t clear, beyond using the current economic situation as cover. Neither is it clear why they chose to go with Klein over Morgan, but it seems awfully soon to be making a move like this when the two took over so recently.
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