SAP CEO McDermott revs up schedule after losing an eye (UPDATE)

UPDATE: McDermott told me today he's scheduled a Roman benefit event for Dec. 14. More from our interview in Monday's Philadelphia Inquirer. EARLIER: SAP SE chief executive Bill McDermott's ongoing recovery from a gruesome July 4 weekend accident has forced him to cancel a prominent Philadelphia fundraising event.

McDermott has begged off being the honoree at this year's Greater Philadelphia Leadership Award Dinner scheduled for Oct. 15 at the Union League club. The annual event last year raised a quarter of a million dollars for tuition assistance to Roman Catholic High School in Center City.  "I regret that my recovery has interfered," said McDermott in a statement, pledging continued support for the school. The dinner has been cancelled, says Patrick Plunkett, a Roman development officer.

McDermott, a hard-charging former Xerox salesman known for his enthusiastic stem-winding orations before sales and customer and college audiences, nearly bled to death in a freak midnight accident while visiting his father over the national holiday, SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner told the German magazine Wirschafts Woche (Business Week) earlier this month.

McDermott told SAP colleagues that he fell on a staircase, and that a glass of water he was carrying broke, piercing his left eye and cutting skin, nerves and blood vessels in his face. Alone on the ground floor of the house, he crawled outside and was helped by a passerby, according to Plattner's account. In a series of operations doctors were able to extract the glass but were unable to save the eye from infection and removal. Plattner added that McDermott was on the mend and was expected to resume flying to SAP management events in October.

McDermott has posted his account here on Facebook. Despite the accident, "I feel grateful" to be alive, loved, and well-cared-for, he writes. "I feel optimistic because that's who I am... True insight doesn't come from what we see, but from what we know and feel. I have lost an eye, not my curiosity or my compassion. I am no less capable of leading SAP."

The dinner has been a yearly fundraiser for Roman Catholic High School since alumni rallied to avert a threatened shutdown more than 20 years ago.  The school's supporters last year arranged to purchase properties near its campus at Broad and Vine Sts., and are raising $25 million to expand Roman's science and technology, fine-arts and athletic facilities, and increase enrollment capacity from the current 955 to around 1,200. (Roman, whose enrollment includes about 200 non-Catholic students, says most of its graduates go to college, and that it places several a year to Penn, and two in the past four years to Stanford, among others.)

The dinner until now has honored mostly well-known local figures who support Roman, such as developer Daniel M. DiLella (2006), lawyer Jimmy Binns (2009) and Independence Blue Cross chief Daniel J. Hilferty (2012). McDermott added an international dimension, given SAP's global scale (it is a multinational rival to California-based Oracle and other business software giants.) "We really appreciate his support and were looking forward to his appearance," Plunkett added.