The brutal reality of supply chain leadership.
Drawing from his time in the leadership trenches at Amazon, SpaceX, and Honeywell, Torsten explores the emotional and intellectual evolution required to lead at the highest levels. This conversation moves beyond traditional silos, offering a masterclass in systemic thinking, the loneliness of standing in the boardroom, and what the AI era really demands of operators.
Torsten Pilz.
Torsten Pilz is a world-renowned operations executive and the Founder of Counterpoint Labs, a tech firm dedicated to rewiring supply chains for the AI era. With a career defined by leadership roles at some of the world's most innovative machines, including serving as Chief Supply Chain Officer at Honeywell, Amazon, SpaceX, and 3M, he is uniquely positioned to comment on what greatness looks like under extreme operational pressure.
A chemical engineer by training, he has spent decades navigating the tension between technical engineering excellence and the stubbornly real outcomes of global supply chain management. Today, he is a leading voice on the integration of human judgment with autonomous technology, advocating for a shift from functional optimization to truly orchestrated, end-to-end systems.
Derek Lutz in conversation with
Torsten Pilz.
Defining greatness and the cost of scale
You've operated inside some of the most admired machines in modern history. Amazon, SpaceX, Honeywell. If we strip it all back, what separates the great from the merely successful in supply chain?
There is no generic answer because you must understand the specific value drivers of the environment you are in. At SpaceX, the supply chain must keep up with innovation speed where changes happen while the rockets are being built. At Amazon, it is about relentless customer obsession and operational discipline at unprecedented scale. The leaders who succeed are the ones who deeply read the environment and adapt their operating model to it, instead of importing a playbook from somewhere else.
Which of these environments nearly broke you?
At Amazon, the pressure isn't episodic; it's constant, structural, and institutional. You feel capable and insufficient at the same time. It taught me a level of emotional calmness, learning to compartmentalize pressure so your brain works on the solution rather than agonizing over the problem.
The realities of C-suite leadership
What kind of supply chain leadership is the loneliest when the board wants blood?
The loneliness comes when you have to tell the truth in a boardroom that makes everyone very quiet. Supply chain outcomes are stubbornly real and least deniable. Revenue can be managed, but supply chain failures are visible. You have to be the person to say, 'This isn't a quarterly problem, this is a structural one,' and stand behind that with data, even when nobody wants to hear it.
If you walked into a broken mid-market company today, what's the first brutal truth you'd tell them?
Most companies blame the ERP, the data, or the systems. They spend years implementing new software, but it ends up being the same dysfunction running on newer code. The real issue is almost always leadership. Planning processes often exist to create the appearance of planning rather than to drive a real decision.
Career advice and executive credibility
How does a rising leader earn a seat at the executive table and actually belong there?
You must learn to think outside your direct function. Supply chain leaders are often operationally fluent but financially illiterate. You need to learn the language of the CFO, P&L and capital, to understand how they think. Additionally, you need scar tissue. Executives don't trust people who haven't been burned by a real decision.
What kills credibility instantly when you are sizing someone up?
Making things up or trying to confuse people with complexity to hide a lack of detail. I also look for the capability-to-ego ratio, something I learned from Elon Musk. You want to be off the charts on capability and very low on ego; that is the winning combination.
The future: AI and systems engineering
How will AI change the next wave of supply chain leadership?
We are moving toward a touchless, seamless supply chain that runs in real-time rather than monthly buckets. The last 25 years were about functional optimization. Logistics optimizing logistics, procurement optimizing procurement. That is becoming irrelevant. The future leader is an orchestrator of systems and an editor of machine output, not the executor of every transaction.