Human Innovation with Jens Heitland

Christopher Filipiak works with CEOs on sales, and this conversation looks at why revenue rarely comes down to tactics alone. Jens and Christopher discuss the mindset behind CEO-level selling, the idea of a best-fit client, and what it takes to bring revenue under control in a large organization.

00:03 Should CEOs Be Involved in Sales?

01:38 Mindset vs. Skillset

06:20 From Engineer to Sales

15:36 Why CEOs Should Sell

20:13 Strategy: Money Map & Best Fit Clients

34:58 Knowing Yourself

Connect with Christopher Filipiak:

Website: christopherfilipiak.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherfilipiak/

Connect with Jens:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

In this episode of Human Innovation, I sit down with Neil Pendle, founder of Waterscan, in Belgium.

Neil built Waterscan from a single contract into one of the UK's leading water consulting firms, working with organizations like British Telecom, Tesco, and Whitbread across nearly three decades, before stepping down as CEO earlier this year and handing leadership to his successor, Barry.

We talk about the moment water stopped being a sustainability line item and became a business continuity risk. Neil describes a call one of his clients, a major brewer, received this year, informing them the water supply would be shut off within the hour. We look at why that kind of call is becoming more common across the UK and southern Europe, what businesses like Gatwick Airport have learned the hard way, and what practical steps organizations can take now, from operating boreholes more effectively to sharing non-potable water between neighboring businesses.

Neil also reflects on leadership itself, drawing a parallel between his life playing international hockey and building a company from the ground up, and how his own leadership style changed over thirty years of growth.

Timecode:

00:00 Hockey World Cups

00:46 Why Number 13

02:39 Sport as Balance

04:38 Coaching and Leadership

05:40 Leading a Growing Company

08:23 Hiring for Attitude

09:58 Stepping Down as CEO

11:41 No Water No Business

13:16 Water Shutdown Reality

17:17 Building Water Resilience

19:50 Gatwick Airport Case

23:21 Droughts and Demand Gap

23:53 Water Needs All Levels

24:28 Policy And Behavior Shift

26:56 Water Pricing Reality

29:46 Talent And Reputation

32:09 Careers In WaterScan

36:16 Origin Story Waterscan

38:04 Scaling And Customer Focus

40:36 Handling Setbacks Together

42:32 Future Data And AI

44:28 Resilience And Risk Mindset

47:33 Closing Thanks

Guest links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-pendle-26332227/

Jens Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

Kambiz Shekdar owns the platform technology behind Chromovert, a method for engineering cells that model human disease inside a lab dish. He built the company on customer funding alone, without venture capital, and is now scaling a second company across the US, UAE, and China.

In this episode, he talks with Jens about the science behind the platform, the path to becoming the first recipient of the UAE's inventor Golden Visa, and what drives him beyond the technology itself.

Highlights:

00:00 Welcome and Setup

00:17 Music Meets Science

02:59 Creativity and Genetics

04:59 Growing Up Worldwide

05:55 UAE Energy and Opportunity

07:30 Golden Visa Origin Story

10:58 Chromovert Breakthrough

13:25 How Chromovert Works

15:24 From Patent to Company

16:46 Customer-Funded Growth

19:33 Scaling the Platform

21:13 GPCR Drug Discovery Funnel

24:47 AI and Better Data

29:18 UAE vs Boston vs China

31:39 Funding Paths and Defense

36:46 COVID and Biodefense Use

43:02 LinkedIn Live Interviews

46:46 Building Great Teams

50:20 Closing Thanks and Wrap

Guest links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kambiz-shekdar-51a52a34/

Business: https://www.secondcellbio.com/

Jens Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

Jens Heitland speaks with Glenn Turner, CEO of RBS, a hospitality software company that has grown from around 140 properties in 2020 to nearly five thousand today. Glenn has spent decades inside hospitality and technology businesses, and the conversation moves through delegation, incentives, artificial intelligence and the question of what a business owes the people inside it.

Glenn opens with a habit he keeps returning to. If a leader still has a to-do list, something has gone wrong somewhere in how work is being delegated. He replaces lists with regular conversations about where the business is going and why, a story he finds himself repeating constantly as RBS grows through acquisition.

The two talk about incentives beyond salary, and how recognition and attention often outlast money as a source of motivation. Glenn walks through the Profits First framework that shapes how a hospitality business has to reserve capital before it spends, since guests stop coming the moment a property looks tired. From there the conversation turns to artificial intelligence, where Glenn describes managing AI agents that watch reviews, invoices and guest communication around the clock, and compares using AI to riding a bicycle with your hands still on the handlebars.

Glenn also shares what he learned about trust and succession after a plane crash kept him out of his previous company for months, and the business ran without him regardless. Jens brings in his own experience mentoring young entrepreneurs from across Europe, and the two find the same gap in different generations: the instinct to reach for a solution before the problem itself is understood. Glenn tells a story from early in his career about a workplace argument over smoking breaks, and how the data ended up proving the opposite of what everyone assumed about productivity.

Toward the end, Glenn explains a question he asks people on his team that has nothing to do with business at all: how has your faith shaped what is happening for you. It is a question built to get past a rehearsed answer and toward the background that actually explains how someone thinks, which matters in a team spread across cultures and geographies. The two also talk about why hospitality, at its core, will always depend on physical presence, even as digital tools take over everything around it.

The conversation closes on where RBS and the hospitality industry are heading, and why Glenn believes real human connection is the one thing technology will never be able to disrupt.

Timecode:

00:00 Ep.259_Podcast_Glenn Turner

01:14 The To-Do List Trap

08:48 Building a Profitable Hospitality Business

33:54 AI: Opportunities and Risks

42:58 The Faith Question

Guest links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jglennturner/

Business: https://rbsgo.com/

Jens Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

Saren Keang: A Life Built Against the Odds

I had the chance to speak with Saren Keang in this episode. Her story runs through three countries, two health crises, and one pattern that repeats quietly across a generation.

Saren grew up in a small village in Cambodia, in the years after the genocide, when the country was still rebuilding an economy that had almost nothing left in it. Her mother sold food from a bicycle to make two or three dollars a day. Her father had arthritis and could not work. In that environment, a belief took hold. Girls could go to primary school, but nothing more was expected of them. Boys were the ones who continued.

That belief was not held by one or two people. It was a system, repeated quietly across a generation. Saren's older sister was pulled out of school at grade four. Her younger sister left at grade nine. Neither of her siblings went on to finish a college degree. Saren watched this happen and understood, early, that the same pattern was waiting for her.

Selling clams and grilled chicken wings after school helped pay for her father's medicine, and she kept studying anyway, because education was the only path out that she could see. That decision earned her a scholarship to a university in Bangladesh built specifically to support young women from across Asia, and later a dual master's degree in the United States. She is now the first person from her village to hold two master's degrees from a US university, and the first from her district to hold three master's degrees from two different countries.

The cost did not end when she left Cambodia. While completing her third master's degree, Saren was also financially supporting a family of ten back home, and doing so while living with kidney failure and bipolar disorder at the same time. In January 2023, a routine blood test led to an emergency room visit. Her kidney function had dropped sharply, and by March her kidneys were functioning at eight percent. Dialysis followed, three times a week, four hours at a time, and she kept writing her research on the days her energy allowed it. In February of this year, she received a transplant that matched her blood type and antibodies exactly, and she has been recovering well since.

A psychotic episode in 2017, not long after losing her father, led to her first bipolar disorder diagnosis. Her family combined traditional healing in a Buddhist pagoda with medication collected from a clinic in the capital. She speaks about the diagnosis directly, without performance, because she wants to reduce the silence that still surrounds mental health in her home country and elsewhere.

Two books have come out of this journey, and Saren now mentors high school and college students, particularly newcomers and immigrant youth, on navigating scholarships. That work started informally with young women from Cambodia and is something she wants to extend further.

None of this reads to her as exceptional. It reads as a series of decisions made inside a system that told her, repeatedly, to stop. She kept choosing to continue, and now she spends part of her time helping others find the same path. That pattern is worth watching, in Cambodia and anywhere else it shows up.

Highlights:

00:00 Arriving in Canada

02:49 Growing up in Cambodia

20:35 Kidney Diagnosis

35:00 Bipolar Diagnosis

41:12 What's Next

Guest links:

Saren Keang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saren-keang-796466260/

Jens Links:

What Europe's Latest Deals Reveal About Capital, Governance, and Speed

Working across large organizations for close to thirty years, I have learned to watch for moments when two situations look similar on the surface but diverge underneath. This third episode of The European Perspective gave us several of those. Stewart was away this time, so Stephen Brooks and Annette van Berge Henegouwen carried the conversation with me.

We started with SAP's investment in Prior Labs, a UK tabular model company that recently raised well over a billion. It reads like a European win, but Stephen pointed out that Microsoft is funding Mistral's infrastructure buildout too, meaning an American hyperscaler is paying for European capability while embedding it into its own cloud. The same question followed us through Humanoid, Cusp AI and Neko Health: Europe is producing valuable companies, but ownership of the growth that follows them is not guaranteed.

Annette brought a more hopeful thread from her time at the European Innovation Academy, where three hundred students are building startups from scratch this month. Her point: education systems reward compliance over curiosity, and the skills entrepreneurship actually needs are rarely taught directly.

Volkswagen and Continental gave us the sharpest contrast of the episode. Volkswagen is trying to bring its whole organization through a long co-creation process. Continental sold ContiTech to private equity and returned to being a pure-play tire maker. Same pressure, opposite paths, and neither one is obviously right.

Banking added another layer, with Berlin's UniCredit and Commerzbank agreement landing the same week as an EU banking reform blueprint. Annette called it integration in theory, ring-fencing in practice.

We closed on AI agents, and a mistake I made myself: burning three hundred euros in a single day without checking what the tokens were producing. Several corporates are now shutting agent programs down instead of fixing the measurement problem underneath them. The lesson is not to abandon the technology. It is to measure what it actually costs against what it returns.

Timecode

00:00 Welcome & Intro

00:44 Tech & AI: SAP, Mistral, Microsoft

05:08 Success Stories: Funding Roundup

17:00 Transformation & Governance: VW vs Continental

23:46 Banking: UniCredit & Commerzbank

27:45 Entrepreneurial Thinking: Founders Returning

34:28 F-Up of the Week

Guests Links

Annette Van Berge Henegouwen: https://www.annettevanbergehenegouwen.com/

Stephen Brooks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenabrooks1/

Links:

⁠https://www.jensheitland.com/links

What Immersive Theater Teaches Us About Building Future-Ready Organizations

Six years ago, I recorded an episode with David Bassuk from opposite sides of a lockdown. This week we sat together again in the Netherlands, in the same room, and the distance between those two conversations turned out to be a useful place to start talking about readiness.

David has spent the years in between working across theater, game design and artificial intelligence, teaching in the United States and Austria while running an immersive production company in China. One of his current projects, called Aurora, blends live theater with a video game system. Actors perform on stage while an AI platform tracks audience reaction through a phone app and feeds it back into the story as the performance continues. It is already commercially funded, and it points to a wider shift in how technology, culture, and human behavior are converging inside a single experience.

What interested me most in our conversation was not the technology itself but the concept underneath it. David described future readiness as an extension of ordinary readiness, the same alertness a person has when entering unfamiliar water with a snorkel. Every sense opens at once. The moment part of that awareness gets blocked, a person or an organization becomes vulnerable in ways they cannot see coming.

David and I spent much of the conversation exploring what a genuine future readiness lab could look like, built on the same principles as immersive theater. In David's Aurora production, actors step into an arena where the pressure is real, and the audience response changes what happens next. A future readiness lab would ask the same of an executive team, stepping into a constructed environment where a shock actually unfolds and their decisions carry consequences inside the exercise.

David added an important layer. The team being tested is no longer only human. Organizations are only beginning to work out how human and artificial intelligence function together inside a single team, and most have not yet built the culture for that integration.

None of this removes the uncertainty of the future. It simply changes how prepared a person or an organization is to meet it. David closed our conversation with a line from the poet John Keats, that readiness is all. After twenty years inside large organizations, I have come to see that readiness is less about predicting what happens next and more about how deliberately an organization has practiced being tested before it matters.

Highlights

00:00 Reunion In Netherlands

00:32 From Professor To Europe

01:28 Teaching Theater On Zoom

05:08 China Immersive Projects

06:30 Aurora Game Theater Explained

11:06 Edge Creativity Meets Business

16:15 Why China Invests Differently

19:58 Defining Future Readiness

25:05 Business Readiness In Practice

27:51 Imagination And Immersive Learning

32:04 Rethinking Humans In Organizations

34:21 Measuring Creativity And Culture

35:37 Consultants And Identity Gaps

36:40 Innovation Engine Within

37:19 Retail Basics And Culture

39:11 Culture As Immersive Data

41:20 Immersive Learning Rehearsals

42:33 Why Transformations Fail

45:16 Arena Mindset For Leaders

50:12 Scenario Planning Under Pressure

52:47 Consultants Vs Internal Answers

54:50 Human Plus AI Teams

58:54 Edge Teams And Labs

01:03:21 Startup Mentality And Fragility

01:07:34 Readiness Is Everything

01:08:17 Pilot Requirements And Closing

Guest links:

David Bassuk: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbassuk/

Website: https://www.davidbassuk.com/

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

John Glennane traveled from Dublin to The Hague to sit down with Jens Heitland, and the two spent two days talking about what actually holds a business together. John is the CEO of Capventis, a technology and design consultancy, and the co-founder of a project called Glue that reimagines how business and technology should relate to each other.

In this conversation, John and Jens work through why so many organizations end up governed by technology they never fully understand, what John calls the four biases that quietly block improvement, and the seven elements of design he uses to take a business apart and rebuild it with intention. They also talk about education, apprenticeship, the role of AI as an accelerant rather than a shortcut, and the difference between a job and a vocation.

John is the author of Improve: A Good Idea, written with support from James McCabe.

Timecode:

00:00 Welcome Back Netherlands

00:10 Miss O'Neill Lessons

01:26 Choosing Engineering Path

02:44 Education Learning By Doing

06:27 Kids Curiosity And Questions

07:52 Screens And School Tech

10:56 Point Solutions Explained

16:13 Compaq Integration And Ventis

18:58 Business Before Technology

20:38 Evolving Capventis Team

26:40 What Makes Ideas Work

28:01 Why Companies Get Stuck

33:50 Four Biases And Kaizen

41:00 Improvement By Design

43:32 Capability To Mastery

50:01 True Design Seven Elements

50:54 Things And Entities

52:05 Mapping Business Things

52:50 Relationships Matter Most

53:59 Process And Change

55:16 Collections And Knowledge

56:40 Structure The Quintessence

59:14 Space And Time Dimensions

01:00:08 Deconstruct And Reconstruct

01:06:32 AI As Accelerator

01:09:18 Brilliant Basics Adoption

01:14:03 Reinventing Technology Glue

01:23:56 Vocation And Work

01:29:11 Why Write Improve

01:32:31 Who The Book Is For

01:33:52 Closing Thanks And Future

Guest links:

John Glennane: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-glennane-bb7496/

Business: https://www.capventis.com/

Jens Links: ⁠https://www.jensheitland.com/links

Seven major restructuring announcements landed across Europe in a single week, and Jens Heitland sits down with Stewart Guenther, Stephen Brooks, and Annette van Berge Henegouwen to work through what they actually mean.

In this episode of The European Perspective, the panel covers Mistral's new industrial AI partnership with Airbus and BMW, Peak AI and Seedcamp closing major funding rounds, and a wave of corporate layoffs hitting Volkswagen, Zalando, Helvetia, and Heineken in the same week. The conversation centers on why Volkswagen is discussing up to a hundred thousand job cuts while Stellantis, facing the same market pressure, is executing a sixty billion euro plan it built years in advance. The group breaks down what separates a board reacting to a crisis from a board that already had one, and what it actually takes to build innovation at the edge of a large organization before disruption forces the decision.

00:00 Intro & Headlines

01:03 Technology: Mistral's Industrial AI

13:44 Success Stories of the Week

29:44 Transformation: Volkswagen & the Auto Industry

44:57 Entrepreneurial Thinking

58:38 Fuck-Up of the Week

01:08:18 Key Takeaways

Guests Links

Stewart Guenther: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smguenther/

Annette Van Berge Henegouwen: https://www.annettevanbergehenegouwen.com/

Stephen Brooks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenabrooks1/

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links

Europe is moving. Most people are not noticing.

In episode, Jens Heitland sits down with Stewart Guenther, Stephen Brooks, and Annette Van Berge Henegouwen to go through the biggest European business stories of the week and what they actually mean for executives operating on this side of the Atlantic.

This week, the Europa AI consortium secured European Commission funding to build an open-source frontier model in 24 languages. Conduct, a London-based data infrastructure company founded by former Palantir engineers, closed a 51 million Series A. Germany took a 40 percent stake in KNDS and cleared the path for a 20-billion-euro IPO. And the Franco-German FCAS sixth-generation fighter program was canceled after Airbus and Dassault failed to agree on leadership.

The conversation moves across AI sovereignty, enterprise data infrastructure, defense investment, drone warfare, entrepreneurial visibility in Europe, and what organizations can learn from a collaboration that collapsed not because of technology but because of ego.

Timecode:

00:00 European Perspective: Tech, Policy, and F Up of the Week

01:07 Technology

17:40 Success Story

35:21 Transformation & Change

49:52 Entrepreneurial Thinking

01:05:41 Fuckup of the Week

Guests Links

Stewart Guenther: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smguenther/

Annette Van Berge Henegouwen: https://www.annettevanbergehenegouwen.com/

Stephen Brooks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenabrooks1/

Links Jens:

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Equipment and Software I Use for My Videos and Podcasts   

Jens Equipment and Software overview: https://www.jensheitland.com/equipment

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Books that I read and recommend.

My Book Recommendations: https://www.jensheitland.com/books

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Here are the ways to work with me:

Speaking: https://www.jensheitland.com/speaking

Leadership Skills Assessment: https://www.wearesucceed.com/

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Connect with me!   

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensheitland/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JensHeitlandofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jensheitland/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jensheitland

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/jensheitland

Newsletter: https://www.jensheitland.com/newsletter

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Subscribe and Listen to The Jens Heitland Show Podcast HERE: 

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Subscribe and Listen to The Daily Hint with Jens Heitland Podcast HERE: 

YT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2tLdutVh6b6nCBgWQ817eQ

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Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-hint-with-jens-heitland/id1722930497

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