What Holger Carlsson Taught Me About Supply Chains, AI, and Human-Centric Leadership
Never fall in love with a beautiful KPI. Especially when a KPI is positive – that’s when you should doubt it most.
I sat down with Holger Carlsson for nearly an hour, and what struck me most was how his entire philosophy – built across IKEA, the UN, and now AI governance – keeps circling back to the same core truth: supply chains are human systems first.
The guy has stories. Lots of them. But they’re not war stories told to impress. They’re case studies in how to build operations that work at scale and keep people whole.
Here’s what I learned.
Contracts Aren’t Armor – They’re Opportunity Systems
Most people treat contracts like insurance policies. Holger treats them like blueprints for how two teams will actually work together.
At IKEA, he was managing a major supplier relationship for kitchen and wardrobe frames. The traditional move: squeeze as much margin as possible, lock it into a contract, move on.
Instead, he tried something different.
They split the price reduction into two parts:
Part one: immediate discount
Part two: triggered only if the product hit agreed volume targets
Simple. Brilliant.
Now everyone was aligned. IKEA’s internal teams knew they had to drive volume. The supplier knew they weren’t being squeezed without upside. The contract wasn’t something that went into a drawer – it became a living operational playbook.
That relationship lasted over six years. No renegotiations. Both sides kept winning.
The insight: Mutuality isn’t nice. It’s operationally smart. If your contracts don’t encode mutual incentives and day-to-day behavior, they’re not contracts – they’re just legal theater.
The Gatekeeper: Your Secret Weapon Against Chaos
When Holger managed quality at IKEA, there was a 90-page documentation on how packaging should look.
Nobody read it. Obviously.
So instead, his team distilled it down to six visual checks – pictures A through F. One person at the unloading dock became the gatekeeper. If a pallet matched any of the “bad” pictures, it was stopped.
That’s it.
Here’s why this matters: every small defect you let through compounds downstream. IKEA’s auto industry contacts told him that recalls are never for 10 cars or 50 cars. They’re always 100,000. Why? Because small issues went undetected for months.
The gatekeeper isn’t a bottleneck. The gatekeeper is how you scale without breaking.
You can apply this everywhere – logistics, admin processes, IT approvals, hiring. Somewhere in your operation, someone needs to be empowered to say “not yet” and have the organization back them up.
That’s not slowing you down. That’s saving you.
Sustainability Isn’t a Mission Statement – It’s a Structure
Holger was blunt on this one: most companies treat sustainability like a poster on the wall.
At IKEA, they did something radical. Every country CEO became Chief Sustainability Officer of their country. Same person. No separate office. No way to hand off responsibility.
Sustainability wasn’t something you reported on. It was how you operated.
What does that look like in practice?
Clear rules on materials: allowed, forbidden, and “sunset candidates” that are being phased out
R&D investments aligned with those rules, not separate from operations
Vendors selected not just on price, but on how they fit the sustainability constraints
Long-term financial planning that accounts for material transitions
Even small companies can do this, he pointed out. If you decide “we only use cardboard and shrink wrap,” you’ve immediately reduced your footprint. You’ve also made it easier to communicate with customers and regulators.
The real insight: Sustainability only sticks when it’s embedded in how you actually make decisions, not when it lives in a separate team.
Human-Centric AI: The Underrated Move
Holger isn’t anti-automation. He’s anti-inhuman work.
There are tasks that destroy focus, annihilate mental health, and bring zero value from human judgment. Those are the prime candidates for AI.
His examples stick with me:
Workers staring at moving textile rolls for hours, trying to spot weaving defects with magnifiers
People watching a conveyor belt of egg cups, hunting for eggshell fragments
Staff physically inspecting pallets one by one to check for broken boards and nails
In all these cases, AI isn’t the threat. AI is the more humane choice.
The goal isn’t to eliminate the person. It’s to eliminate the soul-crushing task and free that person for something that matters.
One of his current projects involves using AI for pallet inspection. The system automatically scans pallets, classifies them by compliance, and builds sorted stacks. Result: fewer injuries, 99%+ accuracy, and labor shifted to higher-value work.
That’s not job destruction. That’s human-centric automation.
The warning: If your AI initiative starts with “how many people can we cut?”, you’ve already gone wrong.
Governance: The Unsexy Thing That Saves You
Holger is a partner at Credo AI, focused on AI governance. On paper, that sounds thrilling – like watching paint dry.
But it’s actually the opposite.
With hundreds of AI-related regulations now in effect (especially in the EU), companies can’t just “move fast and break things.” They’ll break regulations.
The smarter move is to:
Do risk assessments at the use-case level. Not “is AI risky in general?” – “is this specific use case legal, ethical, and aligned with our values?”
Align your warring teams around a shared framework. In most organizations, Legal says “slow down.” Engineering says “speed up.” Risk says “document everything.” This creates internal paralysis.
A structured governance approach doesn’t brake progress. It’s the only way to scale without stepping on landmines.
AI as a Talent Magnet (If You Frame It Right)
Supply chain is facing a massive talent shortage. Most leaders respond with despair.
Holger sees it differently.
Supply chain is misunderstood. In his view, almost everything is a supply chain – whether it’s delivering physical products or services. The world’s 100+ trillion in GDP is essentially a web of interconnected supply chains.
Now layer in AI.
Young people – especially 18-24 year-olds who grew up coding and gaming – love running algorithms, writing prompts, and exploring scenarios. What if you hired them to:
Compress analysis from three days to one hour using AI
Model multiple supply chain strategies simultaneously
Test scenarios that would have taken weeks to explore manually
Then hand off validated insights to experienced supply chain leaders for decision-making
You’re not replacing experienced supply chain people. You’re amplifying them. And you’re creating a new category of hybrid roles that are genuinely exciting.
But it requires HR and leadership to actually design and sell these roles as future-proof careers, not as “tech jobs in supply chain.”
When Automation Goes Too Far (And How to Know)
Holger believes that fully de-humanized organizations are doomed.
If your company optimizes purely for financial performance and treats humans as expendable, you’ll eventually discover that systems don’t deliver results. People using systems do.
He won’t name specific examples, but the pattern is clear: organizations that try to run on automation alone become brittle. No resilience. No adaptation. No innovation.
The real art is mixing humans and technology intelligently. Not “minimize humans.” Not “technology for its own sake.”
The combination.
White Space Is Non-Negotiable
This one hit different.
Holger had a mentor who told him: “You guys work too much. Next time you travel for work, block out one afternoon. Don’t plan anything. Go to a museum. Get coffee. Take a walk.”
The logic: If leaders are always firefighting, they’ll always have fires.
Strategy doesn’t emerge from inbox triage. It emerges from space to think.
Holger shared a tactic he actually uses – the “fake vacation.” You tell the office you’re off for an afternoon. You actually come in, but with zero meetings. You protect that block for thinking, reading contracts, redesigning processes, reflecting.
It sounds small. It’s not.
Most leaders are proud of how many hours they work. The real signal of effectiveness? How much time you carve out to think.
Owning the “How” Even When the “What” Is Imposed
Holger’s “Atlantico” story is worth dwelling on because it’s about a specific kind of leadership courage.
At IKEA, corporate decided which regions should focus on which product categories. Atlantico – Holger’s region – was flagged as non-competitive in several areas, including lighting.
Most leaders would fight to keep everything.
Holger did the opposite. He went to headquarters and said: “These suppliers aren’t competitive for us. Find someone else to source lighting. We’re not the right fit.”
At the same time, he proved that Switzerland – supposedly the highest-cost country on Earth – could produce the cheapest laminated flooring in the world. Why? Because cost isn’t about wages per hour. It’s about raw materials, energy, and capital costs. All of which Switzerland had optimized.
The bigger lesson came later, when corporate orders contradicted what his team had been told for two years.
His response: “The strategic ‘what’ is settled. We’re going to own the ‘how.’”
In other words:
Don’t fight the direction decided by the board
But fight fiercely to shape how it gets executed
Because execution is where leadership actually lives
That distinction matters. A lot.
KPIs Can Lie – Go Check the Floor
This story still unsettles me.
On IKEA’s dashboard, damage incidents were reported at 0.5% of deliveries. Looked good. Bonus-worthy, even.
Something felt wrong to Holger. The only way to know was to actually look at the goods.
So he went to the unloading bay at 4-5 a.m.
The reality: Around 30% of pallets had issues. Not 0.5%.
The KPI was disconnected from reality. The data collection was broken. The entire dashboard was theater.
To fix it, his team:
Brought store managers and operations together
Showed them visually what “compliant” and “non-compliant” actually looked like
Went through the aisles together, removing anything questionable
Within hours, there were massive stacks of removed products. The managers who’d been rewarded for “good” KPIs panicked.
Holger’s response was memorable: “We can put it all back if you want. Or, if you’re not sure, leave it on the shelf for a day and see what customers do.”
His insight: Never fall in love with a beautiful KPI. Especially when a KPI is positive – that’s when you should doubt it most.
Data collection and definitions must reflect reality, or your entire management model is built on sand.
What I’m Taking Away
Holger’s career spans continents, sectors, and technologies. But the through-line is unmistakable.
Supply chains are human systems first.
That means:
Design mutuality into contracts and partnerships
Protect the gatekeepers – the people who say “no” at the right moment
Use technology to eliminate inhuman work, not to eliminate humans
Own execution even when direction is imposed
Go to the floor and let reality challenge your dashboards
Carve out time to think
He’s not anti-technology. He’s anti-cargo-cult thinking. Anti-theater. Anti-the-idea-that-good-intentions-and-nice-dashboards-equal-good-operations.
That’s refreshing.
Because supply chain, at its core, is still about trust. Movement. Delivery. Relationships.
Add in the tools – AI, automation, better data – and you get something powerful.
Subtract the human judgment, the accountability, the willingness to actually look at what’s happening?
You get a disaster in slow motion.
Holger’s bet is that the companies that figure out how to keep both – tools and people, scaled and humane – will win the next decade.
I think he’s right.
Want to hear the full conversation? It’s out now on Voice of Experts podcast. Holger gets into even more depth on his time at the UN, scaling Carson International, and why he’s still excited about the future of trade.
For more content read our notes at https://codedesign.org/voice-experts-holger-carlsson-human-centric-ai-supply-chain-wisdom