Ahead of the ask

When Katie’s team got brought in, all eight of its specialists ended up working together as a small group. Katie has watched competitors respond to the pace of AI infrastructure by spinning their thermal businesses out into subsidiaries and smaller companies, simply so they can react faster. But Henkel's thinking was that it would be smarter to find that speed from the inside. Speed in this sense means putting technologies into the market before customers have requested them. Or as Katie puts it: "We're not going to wait for the customer to tell us they need it. This market segment in particular requires a level of agility and risk-taking, which is a very comfortable area for me."

The hyperscalers and OEMs she serves have compressed their own design cycles, and they need partners who are already there waiting, not suppliers who only start moving when the order lands. Getting there first is a calculated risk that is built on expertise and market feel rather than hope.

The stakes are real. As chips grow denser and hotter, thermal management and efficient heat dissipation have become one of the real bottlenecks in the data center industry. The fact is that a small change in advanced materials can have an outsized effect on what a whole facility can process. Getting ahead of that problem is the job.

The point of moving early is not speed for its own sake. "We're using our expertise to enable our customers to do the things that they need to do, so that they can take risks as well," Katie says. In her framing, Henkel's agility only matters because it becomes the customer's agility too.

Katie is just as sure that materials will keep improving as she is that chips will keep running hotter. What she is less sure anyone has fully thought through is what all of it does to the people: which roles will grow and which will disappear. "Those are the questions that are really hard to answer, and maybe also a little bit uncomfortable," she says without trying to tidy the discomfort away. Her position settles on two words she keeps close together: "It's a privilege that we get to work on this exciting technology, and then it's our responsibility to use it in the best way that we can."

Katie knows she is not going to change a company of Henkel's age and reach overnight, and she does not want to. What she can do is embody the thing she wants more of, and for her that's about leading with people. "Building a culture is an active process. If you're not continuously working on it, you'll end up losing it."

Her method is disarmingly plain. She asks why. When she meets a process that exists because it has always existed, she wants to know the reason for it, whether it is still the best way, and what would happen if it changed. "There's a reason we do it this way," she says. "My next question is always: what is that reason, and does it still hold true today?"

The philosophy suits an engineering company whose entire history is the pursuit of making things work better. Materials improve because someone keeps asking whether they can. The same instinct, she suggests, is what keeps the whole industry from stalling.

"Things like working in silos," she says, are one culprit. So is something more human: teams that get too attached to a technology and won't let go of it, because they've already invested too much in it. "It's like the sunk cost fallacy," she says. Her own instinct runs the other way: "If it's wrong, it's OK. We don't blame anyone. We learn from it. We pivot and we move on."