For 25 years, problems found Darragh de Stonndún and he solved them. That was the job, and he was good at it.
Then it became the problem.
“I spent 25 years as an engineer, and the instinct is always to get into the problem yourself,” he says.
Today he leads Automated Industrial Robotics. The group is known as AIR, and it has brought companies and teams together across three countries. That growth is exactly what broke his old way of working. A leader who personally dives into every problem becomes the slowest part of his own company, and the better the leader is at solving things, the worse the bottleneck gets.
“That instinct becomes a bottleneck,” he says. “I’ve moved from solving problems to designing the organization that solves them.”
The shift sounds simple. Living it means giving up the work that made him good in the first place, and replacing it with work that has no satisfying moment of fixing anything. Most of his time now goes to people and direction. Who leads what. Where the company is going. Whether AIR is building the capabilities that will matter in five years instead of just this quarter.
The five-year question is the one he watches most closely. A quarter rewards firefighting. A five-year horizon rewards the slower work of developing leaders, building systems and choosing which capabilities to grow before the market demands them.
Nothing tests that philosophy like an acquisition. AIR has grown by joining forces with other companies, and de Stonndún holds an unfashionable view of what should happen next.
“We join forces with companies because of what they’re good at,” he says. “So the worst thing we could do is sand that away.”
What gets protected is specific. The customer intimacy, because those relationships are why the revenue exists. The engineering craft, because that is why the products work. The local pride and the relationships built over decades, because they cannot be rebuilt once an integration grinds them down. Those are the reasons the deal happened, so they stay.
What changes is the connective tissue. The companies adopt shared standards for quality and safety. They run on common systems and hold to the same financial discipline. Customers get a consistent experience wherever they touch the group, without losing the people they trusted before the logo changed.
His test for whether an integration worked is one sentence.
“The test is whether a customer notices things got better, not that something got taken away.”
Underneath all of it sits a plain definition of accountability. Every person at AIR should know what they own. They should know why it matters and what good looks like. And they should say early when something is going off track.
Early is the word doing the work. A problem raised in week one is engineering. A problem raised in week ten is a crisis. De Stonndún builds for the first kind, which means making it normal to surface bad news while it is still small.
The approach matters beyond his own company. Manufacturers are being pushed to adopt new technology faster than ever, and the firms that navigate it well will not be the ones with the smartest person at the top. They will be the ones designed so that good decisions happen everywhere, without the CEO in the room.
De Stonndún spent half his career being the person with the answers. He now measures himself by how rarely anyone needs to ask him.
