Human Innovation

Human Innovation explores leadership at the intersection of decisions, responsibility, and scale.

Hosted by Jens Heitland, CEO of Heitland Media Group and former Global Head of Innovation at IKEA Centres, the show features long-form conversations with CEOs and senior leaders from international organizations.

Each episode focuses on how leaders think, decide, and navigate complexity, not just what they have built. The conversations move beyond surface-level success stories to examine judgment, trade-offs, and the human realities of leadership at scale.

Listen on: Spotify , Apple Podcast , Amazon Music , Radio Public , Stitcher , RSS

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Jens Heitland 10/21/26 Jens Heitland 10/21/26

EP271: Sandra Silva: Growth Through Discomfort

Sandra Silva, CEO of Veolia Portugal, joins Jens Heitland on the Human Innovation Podcast to talk about how leaders grow through uncomfortable moments, why a manager once told her to make herself dispensable, and how Veolia builds that thinking into its trainee program, its employee shareholder model, and its approach to new managers.

The conversation also covers ecological transformation across water, energy, and waste; the growing importance of resource sovereignty in Europe; and how Veolia is piloting full automation, with HR involved from the start, to protect the human skills efficiency could otherwise remove.