The Leader Who Runs on KPIs - and Finally Built One for Her Brain

Monika Redzko-Otto is a CFO and COO working across Poland, Germany and Portugal. She runs finance and operations inside an automated industrial environment - machines moving at six metres per second, AI being introduced to teams that never had to think about cognitive load before.

She tracks margins, KPIs, and operational metrics. She knows what good looks like in every system she manages.

Except, until recently, one - her own brain.

In this episode, Monika describes the moment brain fog started showing up mid-meeting. The freezing. The shame. The journey through doctors and scans that found nothing.

And how she eventually did what she does with every system she manages - broke the problem into measurable parts and built a dashboard for her own cognitive performance.

We talk about:

• Why high-complexity roles with constant context switching are among the heaviest loads a brain can carry
• What the glymphatic system has to do with that 3pm coffee cutoff
• Why labelling everything "stress" is the cognitive equivalent of stamping a P&L line item "other"
• The three KPIs Monica now tracks for her own brain - and why they work

This is a conversation about precision. About what happens when a performance-driven leader turns the same rigour she applies to everything else onto herself.

Take care of your cockpit.