Focus on the Essentials, Accept Change, Stay Humble: Valuable Advice from the Speakers at TAL 2025

• Trends
• Article

“If you had to choose the one thing that’s helped you the most... what would it be?” At this year’s Trends in Automotive Logistics conference – with the tagline “Digital. Future-Proof?” – speakers shared their opinions on the most important lessons their professional journeys have taught them. In these logistics experts’ answers, you’ll find both values and practical tips – from daily decision-making to strategies for managing people and changes. Together they offer a diverse yet surprisingly consistent map for everyone who wants growth – professional or personal.

---

What do you see as the most important thing you’ve learned during your career?

It’s hard to define precisely one thing. It helps me personally the most when I request open feedback. Fortunately, I learned to do that right at the start of my career, when feedback was coming in nearly every week. It’s something in fact simple that sometimes slaps you around and other times warms your heart, but everything’s inside it. It lets you grow as a person – or think over your decisions with a newfound perspective. Simply clever.
 

---

What do you see as the most important thing you’ve learned during your career?

The road to success leads past obstacles, which need to be overcome, and not avoided. If you don’t see or want to see a problem, it’s still there, and sooner or later it will catch up to you.
 

---

What do you see as the most important thing you’ve learned during your career?

You’ll be successful if you build a team of people open to new ideas, able to function in a trust-based environment. Because innovations receive financial support and acceptance only when they are quickly implemented and bring true added value – to both internal and external customers.
 

---

What do you see as the most important thing you’ve learned during your career?

We buy and deploy technologies hoping they’ll bring the benefits we desire. We focus on technical aspects to maximise the fit between the IT we’ve deployed and our value-creation processes. But true transformation must also deal with the barriers to change, such as internal inertia, siloed thinking and behavioural patterns built up over years. Peter Drucker, the pioneer of modern management theory, put it this way: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Digital transformation rests on technologies, but it touches the entire organisation – especially beyond the technical domain that I’ve mentioned. New technologies both enable and require new flexible, agile ways of working and decentralised communication channels. Work roles are created, for example, and new profiles spring up in existing professions. New qualifications are demanded, and employee-manager collaboration changes too. Existing corporate processes need to be adapted or rebuilt from the ground up, which can lead to changes in the whole organisation's structure.

---

What do you see as the most important thing you’ve learned during your career?

I wouldn’t say there’s one most important thing that sticks out above all the rest. Key among them is the ability to adapt to change, to approach problems with an open mind while drawing on experience from every discipline, to set the right life priorities and to deal well with failures.
 

---

What do you see as the most important thing you’ve learned during your career?

Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Many things only succeed because you dive into them. And vice versa – lots of projects or changes never become a reality because someone didn’t take the plunge. Getting started is often what’s most important.
 

---

What do you see as the most important thing you’ve learned during your career?

Humility, decency, professionalism and respect. These are the basic values I go by. Alongside these basic pillars, I try to be as efficient as possible. To split tasks into high-priority vs. those that are less important, but do also need to be completed. I give the priority and key tasks 150% concentration and focus on them with maximum precision. The Pareto Principle says 20% of our efforts give 80% of our results and vice versa. In my experience that’s exactly how it is. Many people spend a large part of their capacities on work that has no real use or added value. So it’s vital to identify which activities are the top priorities and then apply our full potential to those.

Share article