You've Been Heard: Regional Execution, Global Governance W/Thomas Wolf - 418 (48:20)
You've Been Heard, Monday, April 20th, 2026
Thomas Wolf is IT Director for DEUTZ Corporation, the US subsidiary and Americas business hub of DEUTZ AG, the oldest engine manufacturer in the world, turning 162 this year. Corporate IT is in Cologne. His team is in Atlanta. The mobile diesel technicians he supports are in excavator pits and aerial-lift jobsites all over the Americas.
He frames his own role as regional IT execution within a global governance, and the last four years of his career as the slow, deliberate work of letting go of the tech guy he used to be. Thomas came out of SAP Security in 2022 and discovered within weeks that the mindset that earned him a director title was the wrong tool for the job.
This conversation is the playbook he wishes someone had handed him then: reframe every ticket as a business outcome, force portfolio transparency so the C-suite sets the priority order, build local solutions like Starlink on service trucks when global cannot see the problem, and never adopt a framework because it is fancy. His eighteen-month AI prediction is that the conversation stops being about the tool and starts being about accountability for AI-driven decisions.