Human Innovation | The Jens Heitland Show

Human Innovation explores leadership where decisions, responsibility, and scale intersect.

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.

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Jens Heitland 9/15/22 Jens Heitland 9/15/22

EP 188: How not to lead - HIQA with Jens Heitland

In this episode I let the listener look into my big list of things I have written down during the last 20 years that I did not like about how people lead me.

I call this list how I will not lead. I am looking at this list at least once per year to remind myself about all the topics.

Topics I cover:

I will not micromanage my team

I will not jump in and solve every problem

I will not be a tank / asshole

I will not let people “hurt” me in public

I will not be the grumpy manager

I will not shout at others

I will not type while a person talks to me

I will not blame my team members in public

I will not talk negative about people behind their back

I will not wait to long to take decisions

Jens Heitland 8/31/22 Jens Heitland 8/31/22

EP 184: Corporate Innovation - How can human innovation change business results? - HIQA Live with Jens Heitland

The topic of the episode: Corporate Innovation - How can human innovation change business results?

Questions I answered in the live show:

Because of covid it is all about saving costs right now in our company. How can I still innovate?

Everyone talks about innovation in our company but all we do are small improvements rather than real innovation. How to change that?

I am a new leader in an organization and responsible for +100 people. How do I motivate people that are long term in the company to innovate themselves?

How could I measure our innovation efforts differently? I am working in finance administration and am responsible for producing the weekly reports. How can we measure innovation?

I don’t have an innovation question but hope you can help me. I am working in a large organization and would like to hire a new person but don’t have the head count. How can I get a new headcount approved?

I am a manager with 5 direct reports, 5k employee company. My manager has no idea how to lead people. He is micromanaging me and the other managers. I am considering leaving the company but want to give it another last try, any idea what I could do?