SAP CEO on Client Handling

SAP CEO Kagermann was a physics professor who turned a businessman in his 30s. Here's a great insight from him -

It was very interesting when I started at SAP and I saw the first client. I had to talk to this client because they wanted me to sell the project system [I was working on]. I was not too good at this in the beginning. I remember I said, "It's pretty simple, it's a [monotonic] function." They just looked at me. It was then I decided to forget everything I learned. [Laughs.] All I [talked about after that] was percentage, plus, minus and nothing more. That helped me a lot -- to come back to a normal language. That's another thing that you have to learn.

Full article -

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1571