Lars Dalgaard is pacing the hallway outside a private dining room at Alexander’s Steakhouse in San Francisco. He’s just left a group of Web entrepreneurs and journalists at a dinner during which he did a lot of running off at the mouth. Dalgaard does this often, but this time he is wondering aloud if he said too much.

Everyone wanted to know what’s going on with Dalgaard since he clinched in early December a $3.4 billion agreement to sell his HR-software company, SuccessFactors, to German giant SAP ( SAP - news - people ). Dalgaard told the dinner audience he got to keep his San Mateo, Calif. headquarters and has a blank check for acquisitions. Dalgaard told them that SAP was going to double its commissions for selling SuccessFactors software. SAP is the world’s largest seller of business applications, with $19.3 billion in revenue last year, double the app sales of runner-up Oracle. Salesforce.com ( CRM - news - people ) is a little less than one-ninth its size.

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Dalgaard was just getting warmed up. “Watch out, Larry Ellison. Watch out, Marc Benioff. This ain’t your grandfather’s SAP,” he bellowed to the guests. Dalgaard walked out of that room a hero to the entrepreneurs gathered there.

But minutes later, out in the hallway, Dalgaard changes mood. His booming voice softens as he leans forward, compacting his 6-foot-4 frame: “I cried when I told our employees we were selling. I couldn’t help myself,” he says. “How uncool is that? Crying. I was on my knees, literally. But you know, no one can control what I do or say.”

Not even Dalgaard can control what he says. He’ll probably get an executive board seat at SAP. In exchange, SAP is getting the loud voice it badly needs. Having Dalgaard in the trenches lobbing propaganda bombs at Oracle and Salesforce.com, two companies very skilled at grenade-launching, is a clear sign that the formerly stolid German software company is breaking out of its Teutonic shell.

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Despite its size SAP has rarely been part of the conversation in Silicon Valley, costing it buzz and ease of recruitment with salespeople and developers. The company’s enterprise resource-planning software had long been considered a necessary evil for big companies, not an area of innovation. SAP twice tried and failed to launch supposedly nimbler Web software, called Business ByDesign, which was dubbed kludgy.

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SuccessFactors brings to SAP the culture and expertise of a company that knows how to build software for the Web. Dalgaard’s role at SAP will be coming up with and building new software. He is the least German business exec you could imagine. A kooky, unfiltered 44-year-old Dane with a distinctive accent, he signs e-mails “Semper Fi” to show loyalty and devotion, even though he was never a Marine.

SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors is part of a broader consolidation of business software companies that operate “in the cloud,” delivering their services via Web browser. Oracle is in the process of buying RightNow for $1.5 billion. Two weeks after SAP grabbed ­SuccessFactors, Salesforce acquired Ryppl, a startup that offers employee-performance-tracking software.

While Dalgaard is happy to take on the role of SAP’s hit man, its co-CEOs, William McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, play it straight to keep the company growing at what has only recently been an even pace. In January SAP preannounced that fourth-quarter results had beat its previous forecast. Revenue was up 10% to $5.7 billion; new software sales were up 17%. For the entire year revenue was likely up 14%. Compare that with Oracle, which had a mere 2% top-line growth in its quarter ending in November, a result that fell well short of Wall Street forecasts.

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Last Updated: 27 February 2008

By AMY CHUA

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

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Erin Patrice O'Brien for The Wall Street Journal

Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.

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All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.

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Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

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Even in our globalizing world, the question as to whether "human rights" is an essentially Western concept, which ignores the very different cultural, economic and political realities of the South, persists. Can the values of a consumer society be applied to societies with nothing to consume? At the risk of sounding frivolous: when you stop a man in traditional dress from beating his wife, are you upholding her human rights or violating his? ... read