Guest:

• Caroline Salen - Executive Search Consultant - Spencer Stuart

Host:

• Alexander Greb

Most advice about reaching the top comes from people who have only ever watched from the outside. Caroline Salen did the job first.

She spent twenty years in tech at HP, Gartner, SAP and SAP Fioneer before moving into executive search. Today she advises boards and CEOs at Spencer Stuart on who should get which job. Which means she knows both what the work really demands and what the people in the room actually decide on.

And most of this conversation is not about the top job at all. It is about the years before it.

We talk about why being excellent at your work stops being enough at a certain point, and what replaces it. Why the strongest CV rarely wins, because hiring is a context decision rather than a beauty contest. Why so many senior hires leave early for reasons that have nothing to do with ability. Why sideways moves often do more for a career than upward ones. Why she tells people to write down every business outcome they deliver, starting today, because you will not remember it in five years. What hands-on experience with AI is currently doing to people's market value, whatever their company says about its appetite for it. And why low ego and learning agility are now things clients ask for by name.

This episode is for anyone aiming at the top level, and just as much for anyone who wants their career to pick up speed again.

Follow Caroline here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinesalen/

Follow Alexander: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergreb/
Follow Johannes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johanneslangguth/

Thanks to Steven Spears for lending his voice for our podcast intro.
Theme music by Luis Álvarez a.k.a. Fourth Dogma

Guests:

• Andreas Breitrück - Director Applied AI - SAP Signavio
• Theiss Heilker - Chief Architect & Engineer - SAP Signavio

Host:

• Alexander Greb

Every company has a set of rules that nobody ever wrote down.
Why you deliver to one customer differently than to all the others. Why someone in planning quietly ignores the red due date, because they know that account and they know it will be fine. Why you turn left in a certain situation when every handbook in the building says right.

None of it sits in your ERP. None of it sits in your process models. It lives in the heads of a handful of people, and when they leave, it walks out of the door with them.

And now we are about to hand a large part of the work to agents. So what exactly are those agents grounded in? Because a model can know everything about SAP and still know nothing about your company.

At Sapphire this year, that question got a name. Company Memory. It was the moment in the keynote where people around me started whispering, what was that, what did they just say.

In this episode I sit down with the two people behind it. Andreas Breitrück from SAP and Theiss Weilker, lead architect at SAP Signavio, who went from the first idea in January to the main keynote stage in May.

What we get into:
- What Company Memory actually is, and why it is not just another documentation project
- Process atoms as the smallest unit of how your company really works
- How tacit knowledge, the unwritten rules and the identity of a business become something an agent can use
- Why Joule needs this layer to act in your company's sense instead of a generic one
- Governance, control and sovereignty over knowledge that used to live only in people's heads
- What happens to organizations that build a thousand agents without ever thinking about this layer
- Why real time transformation may be harder for the organization than for the technology
- What you can already start doing today, without waiting for anything

A conversation about the part of your company that no system ever captured, and what changes once it finally becomes readable.

Follow Andreas here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreasbreitruecka456/
Follow Theiss here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theiss-heilker-a160aa124/

Follow Alexander: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergreb/
Follow Johannes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johanneslangguth/

Thanks to Steven Spears for lending his voice for our podcast intro.
Theme music by Luis Álvarez a.k.a. Fourth Dogma

Guest:

• Dirk Häussermann - Managing Director - SAP Germany

Hosts:

• Alexander Greb - Consulting Director - cbs corporate business solutions
• Johannes Langguth - Head of Business Transformation and Architecture - SAP SE
  
  

"AI is a time machine." That is how Dirk Häussermann, Managing Director of SAP Germany, sums up the technology reshaping his customers, his organization, and his own working day.

In this episode he sits down with Alexander Greb and Johannes Langguth to talk about what has actually changed, and what has not.

We get into why business AI has a completely different job than ChatGPT, why he has not yet seen a single real autonomous enterprise, and why fifty years of legacy might be a data advantage rather than a handicap. Dirk is direct on the roadblocks: the customers still betting on on premise, the governance models that will not survive their first AI agent, and the partners who stay stuck in implementation mode instead of leading the data and architecture conversation.

He also makes the case that the AI talent everyone is fighting over is mostly already sitting inside your organization, pushes back hard on the lazy AI layoff narrative, and explains why shorter project cycles are good news for partners, not a threat.

His core message for anyone waiting for the perfect moment: there is no shortcut, and there is no sneaking out. All in on AI.

A candid conversation about data, governance, talent, and why the next transformation cannot take another five years.

Follow Dirk here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dirk-h%C3%A4u%C3%9Fermann

Follow Alexander: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergreb/
Follow Johannes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johanneslangguth/

Thanks to Steven Spears for lending his voice for our podcast intro.
Theme music by Luis Álvarez a.k.a. Fourth Dogma