Metta

“How hard can it be?” - the sentence behind some of his biggest breakthroughs, and some of his biggest failures.

In this episode, Dirk Ploss, digital pioneer and Associate Director, Early Innovation at Beiersdorf, joins Innovation Brief co-hosts Wil Benton and Gabi Matic to talk about what innovation really looks like when you’re building before anyone else has written the rules, and what three decades at the frontier of digital transformation actually teaches you.

Dirk has spent his career operating just a few years ahead of the curve: from helping transform one of Germany’s largest retailers from mail order to e-commerce, to running entrepreneurship and early innovation programmes inside one of the world’s most recognisable FMCG companies. He’s founded startups, watched two of them fail, and kept going anyway.

According to Dirk, here’s what most innovation frameworks get wrong - transformation isn’t just technical or commercial, the hardest layer is always emotional. Getting people to believe the future will be better than the past. That’s the work nobody puts in the slide deck.

He’s equally clear-eyed about how to actually get things done, something he’s now turning into a book built around a deceptively simple idea: not every task deserves your full attention, and knowing the difference is the skill most of us never develop.

🔗 Listen to the full conversation with Dirk Ploss - link in bio