Editors’ Note

Bill McDermott has been in his current role and has served as a Member of the Board of ServiceNow since 2019. Previously, he was Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Executive Board of SAP. Before joining SAP, he served in senior executive roles with Siebel Systems and Gartner, Inc. He launched his business career at Xerox Corporation, where he rose to become the company’s youngest corporate officer and division president. McDermott got his start as a young entrepreneur running a small delicatessen business on Long Island, New York, at age 17. He received his bachelor’s degree from Dowling College and his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Company Brief

ServiceNow (servicenow.com) is making the world of work, work better for people. The company’s cloud-based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise.

You have built businesses and achieved great success in your career, including leading SAP from $39 billion to $172 billion in value. What interested you in leading ServiceNow and made you feel it was the right fit?

I was inspired by ServiceNow’s hungry and humble culture. It is rare to find a company that has over 16,000 employees and still maintains its tireless focus on innovation. I saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity at ServiceNow to solve the biggest issue that has haunted enterprises for the last half-century – integration. In the past several years, trillions have been invested in digital transformation, but only a fraction of companies are seeing the ROI. Why? Because of the lack of integration across technologies. That’s where ServiceNow comes in. The Now Platform connects different applications and data sources to create intuitive experiences for employees and customers.

Having spent over two years with the best team in the business, I am fired up even more than when I started. It is the honor of my professional career to guide this amazing team on its journey to becoming the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century.

Will you provide an overview of ServiceNow’s business and how you define the ServiceNow difference?

We’ve never lost sight of Fred Luddy’s founding vision for ServiceNow – technology in service of people. Fred said, “There is no better experience than giving someone a piece of technology that lets them do something they never thought they could do.”

Our platform enables people to do things they never thought possible. The Now Platform, the platform of platforms, unifies systems, silos and processes into enterprise workflows that deliver fast time to value and create great customer and employee experiences. The power of the ServiceNow platform is that it’s one data model, one architecture and one platform. This allows us to serve as the control tower for digital transformation, for every business, every industry, and every person.

We are so proud to work with the world’s greatest organizations as they work to achieve their goals. We will never lose our focus on the privilege that comes with saying, “The world works with ServiceNow.”

Will you discuss ServiceNow’s commitment to innovation and where is innovation taking place in the business?

ServiceNow has a customer-led innovation strategy. Our recipe for success is a mix of empathy to understand customer needs and platform flexibility to develop the best solutions at unprecedented speed. In partnership with our customers, we transform the world’s biggest challenges into its biggest opportunities, from turning vaccines into vaccinations to tracking ESG progress and helping solve supply chain issues. Take what we are doing in the manufacturing industry. We’re working with one premium German auto manufacturer who uses ServiceNow as a control tower to orchestrate 30 million parts dispatched from more than 4,000 supplier locations to production centers in Europe and Mexico. The Now Platform identifies potential disruptions and triggers the next-best action. We’re seeing this across all major industries and we’re only just getting started. That kind of innovation is a hallmark of ServiceNow’s best-in-class engineering tradition.

Where do you see the greatest opportunities for growth for ServiceNow as you look to the future?

Digital transformation is the opportunity of our generation. According to IDC, companies will spend $7.8 trillion on digital technologies over the next four years. Every CEO has digital as a top priority because digital organizations leverage the multiplier effect of platforms to deliver exponential growth. We’re also seeing a fundamental shift in how work gets done which will lead to an explosion of productivity. In its Low-Code Development Technologies report, Gartner estimated 70 percent of new applications developed by 2025 will use low-code or no-code technologies. ServiceNow empowers anyone to build applications on our platform. We are reinventing the customer experience by creating consumer grade user experiences for employees and customers. Whatever systems, challenges, or opportunities you have, however fast you need to move, you have a trusted innovator in ServiceNow. ServiceNow is here to help our customers take the biggest possible share of the digital opportunity.

How did ServiceNow adapt its business to address the challenges caused by the pandemic and how proud are you to see the resilience of ServiceNow’s workforce during this unprecedented time?

When COVID hit, my leadership team and I were going into blue sky thinking when we realized there would be no blue sky if we didn’t handle COVID well. We immediately got to work. Our workforce transitioned to work from home in a day and listened to the needs of our employees and customers. We started regular communication with our employees through all hands and leadership team meetings. We also engaged our colleagues through virtual events with luminaries from diverse industries. We provided flexibility for our employees to handle their lives outside of work. With all of this, we continued to operate and innovate at speed and scale, releasing a complete suite of applications to meet the evolving needs of organizations and their employees – from our Workplace Service Delivery solution to our Safe Workplace and Vaccine Administration Management apps, and our twice a year seamless upgrade experience for customers.

Will you shine a light on the Safe Workplace apps that ServiceNow rolled out during COVID?

Employee and workplace safety are top of mind for every business right now, and we are the only company with a complete suite of applications to meet these critical needs. I’m incredibly proud of how ServiceNow responded to the pandemic, both as a company responding to the needs of our customers and how our employees adapted overnight to the new way of work. Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve helped solve the many unprecedented challenges that businesses and society face. Our ability to quickly innovate – in a matter of days rather than weeks, months, and years – has allowed us to support our customers during every turn. From ServiceNow’s Workplace Service Delivery solution and Safe Workplace Suite that helps safely return employees to the workplace, simplify the complexity, and navigate the new world of work, to our Vaccine Administration Management solution that helps convert vaccines into vaccinations more efficiently and seamlessly, we’ve helped millions around the world get vaccinated, stay safe at work, and adapt to hybrid work.

How important is it for ServiceNow to build a diverse and inclusive workforce in order to bring diverse perspectives to the table when making business decisions?

ServiceNow’s purpose is all about people, and that’s why we are so focused on DIBs – Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. The world works when every empowered person can pursue big dreams, be themselves and live to their full potential. Creating a true sense of belonging is one of the most powerful things we can do to recruit and retain top talent. We want people with big dreams to be able to fulfill them here at ServiceNow. When people unlock their unique magic it creates happy people, loyal customers, and true prosperity for all.

What do you see as ServiceNow’s responsibility to the communities it serves and to being a force for good in society?

We are focused on leading with our purpose and making a positive impact on society – using our technology to help the world work better. We take this responsibility seriously, working in partnership with our customers to reinvent business models at digital speed. For example, we know ESG is part of every CEO’s agenda, but things are changing in record time. We developed an integrated solution for companies to activate their ESG strategy, programs, and initiatives – from reducing carbon emissions to enabling business resilience across the enterprise. ServiceNow’s goal is to help companies improve their ESG posture while driving greater environmental, social, and business impact for years to come.

What do you see as the keys to effective leadership and how do you describe your management style?

The pendulum has swung toward leaders being in service to their people as their highest purpose. Lead with empathy and selflessness and never forget that trust is the ultimate human currency – it’s earned in drops and lost in buckets. Everyone values open and honest communication and everything worth communicating is almost always under-communicated. It’s through consistent and clear communication that you can help people realize their own dreams because together, everyone achieves more. As a leader, inspiring people to live up to their greatest potential is the ultimate reward.

What advice do you offer young people interested in building a career in the industry?

There is no replacement for passion. Show up authentically and be intellectually hard-working. In other words, be curious, but also do your homework. Make sure you understand what makes you unique and how your accomplishments can easily translate into impacting the goals of the company. The intersection of those two forces makes magic happen. Winners define destiny. They dream, and they remain ever hungry and humble.