There's a specific kind of frustration that comes from knowing exactly what's broken and spending years building workarounds instead of fixes. Michael Jaszczyk spent two decades inside the machine. Now he's replacing it.
His career started before the term "digital transformation" existed as a buzzword. At a large furniture retailer, he was rotated through every department as a young programmer - stocking shelves, walking the floor, and, memorably, counting 80,000 area rugs by hand. The experience was not glamorous. It was, however, instructive. Jaszczyk saw firsthand where human time was wasted, where patterns repeated themselves mindlessly, and where a well-placed algorithm could change everything.
That early visceral encounter with operational inefficiency became the compass that would guide three decades of technology leadership. He went on to manage operations at MCRL AG, Pironet AG, and SA2 Retail AG before joining the project that would put him on the map of enterprise innovation.