A conversation with Julie McAlindon

Julie A. McAlindon is the senior vice president, regions and chief supply chain officer for Eastman. She is responsible for overseeing supply chain, sourcing and procurement, and regional leadership. McAlindon is also leading the transformation of Eastman by developing business operating model capabilities and serves as the executive sponsor for Equality, a resource group for LGBTQ+ team members and their allies. She joined Eastman in 2016 with extensive experience in marketing, sales, and business leadership. Before joining Eastman, McAlindon held various leadership positions at Avient Corporation and Dow.

Julie and I discuss her role and experiences in organizational transformation across large organizations, including businesses and functions. We discuss the imperatives and trends requiring deft organizational change and identify some of the fundamental capabilities required for future organizational success in materials. We also talk about keys to successfully leading and executing such changes.

Among such trends as digitalization, sustainable materials, and rapidly changing geopolitics, the pace of change for the materials industry is rapidly accelerating. Companies that can incorporate change and large scale transformation into their operating models stand to accelerate their competitive leads.

Held: Thursday, Sept 14, 2023, at 10:00 am EST

Topics discussed

* What constitutes large organizational transformation

* What factors give rise to the need for it

* Execution Success Factors

* Changing Culture

* Examples of Eastman's transformation projects

* Influencing for transformation

* Dealing with dissent

Who should listen?

* Materials company executives.

* Leaders attempting to influence change at any scale in their organizations.

* Leaders of company transformation efforts.

* Aspiring future leaders seeking to ready their skills in change management.

Show Notes (Subscribers only)

* Video Replay - Sep 14, 2023, 10 am EST

* Executive Roundtable for Materials Growth website

* Executive Summary

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com

Most recently, Richard Altice served as the President and CEO of NatureWorks, a leading developer and manufacturer of biopolymers (polylactic acid). During his five-year tenure, Altice successfully led the company to achieve significant revenue growth and profitability. 

Richard Altice is an experienced executive in the specialty chemicals and biopolymers industry. He has consistently achieved revenue growth and profitability by employing a market-focused and value-driven approach in various businesses, markets, and organizations.

Rich and I discuss his career in the chemical industry and some of the key insights and formative experiences he had in leading multiple large global organizations. We discuss his pivot to sustainable materials company NatureWorks one of the earliest companies in the bio-derived plastics segment, and his perspective and outlook on the sustainability trend in materials.

Sustainability is currently the prominent trend in materials, dominating both startup and incumbent firms' technology portfolios. It encompasses a range of approaches such as the use of bio-derived materials like NatureWorks PLA, circular business models that prioritize recycling traditional petroleum derived materials, and the implementation of carbon capture techniques. It is important to note that each of these options comes with its own strategic considerations, risk profiles, and execution methods.

Who should listen? Those who:

* Materials executives

* Sustainability strategists

Topics covered included:

* Dealing with novel materials 

* Current maturity of biomaterials 

* How to consider investments in sustainability 

* Getting execution right 

* Common blind spots for novel biomaterials 

* Reference customers and their role 

* Industry collaborations and role for non-corporate entities 

* Recycling vs. biodegradability

Show Notes: (subscribers only)

* Video Replay - Aug 23, 2023, 10 am EST

* Executive Roundtable for Materials Growth website

* Executive Summary

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com

Bob Eckert is CEO at New & Improved. He focuses on helping organizations harness and develop the innovative brain power of their people to deliver new and improved results.

Bob and I discuss what specific requirements fall to leaders of innovative organizations. This includes both what leaders need to do to build effective innovation organizations and what traits leaders of innovative organizations exhibit. We discuss leader comportment, leader role in building systems and culture, and necessary behaviors around collaboration and accountability.

Who should listen? Those who:

* are driving corporate and business unit innovation initiatives.

* manage and motivate their business unit's innovation resources.

* seek to be champions of innovation within their organizations

Show Notes:

* Video Replay - July 20, 2023, 10 am EST

* Executive Roundtable for Materials Growth website

* Executive Summary

* Slides presented during interview

* Growth Arc’s Executive Breakthrough Coaching program mentioned in the episode

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com

As Executive Director of Alto Impacto, a management and organizational consulting firm, Rodrigo del Campo has worked with companies, and their top leaders, in their transformational processes to become more agile and effective.

With the increasingly accelerating pace of business today most business leaders have begun to realize the importance of flexibility and agility within their organizations over simple productivity and efficiency initiatives. Yet, achieving it is a complex process of changing corporate systems, values and culture. Most corporate efforts on culture change focus on perceptions of an organizations culture, rather than the more fundamental changes to the organization’s systems and values that will result in durable shifts in its performance.

Rodrigo and I discuss keys to unlocking systemic agility within an organization. From examining and addressing key organizational systems: strategic, operational, innovation and people as well as working with the de facto values under which the organization operates, we’ll discuss the challenges, pitfalls, and investments required, as well as the potential payoffs from successful implementation.

Topics covered include:

* What changes in today's world give rise to the need for organizational agility

* What does agility consist of?

* How does an organization begin to improve their agility?

* What has to change in management systems to foster agility?

* What leadership capabilities are necessary to lead a more agile organization?

Who should listen? Those who:

* C-Suite and General Managers who require agility from their organizations, and may be struggling to achieve it.

* HR Professionals who support executives desiring durable improvements in organizational agility.

Show Notes:

* Video Replay - June 14th, 2023 10 am ET

* Executive Roundtable for Materials Growth website

* Executive Summary

* Slides presented during interview

* Growth Arc’s Executive Breakthrough Coaching program mentioned in the episode

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com

Welcome to our next episode of Material Growth, a podcast of the Material Growth Network hosted by Substack. Find the network at materialgrowth.substack.com and join a community of entrepreneurs and business developers who are focused on growth and business-building in the materials industry.

Today’s episode is an Executive Roundtable that we hosted at the end of last year, with guest speaker Bob Lurie, PhD.

Bob Lurie is the former Vice President, Corporate Strategy for Eastman. Prior to joining Eastman, he was co-managing partner of Monitor Group which was acquired by Deloitte in 2013. He founded Monitor's marketing and growth practice, known as M2C, and led it through more than a decade of double-digit growth. He was the architect of the innovative approach to organic growth that fueled M2C’s success and laid the groundwork for his book The Organic Growth Playbook.

Traditional marketing is being revolutionized today by the digital approaches and tools we have available. We’ve never had the ability as we do today to understand our customer’s buying behavior in detail through the use of digital tools. And frankly, the materials industry hasn’t figured that out yet. The standard Marketer’s playbook of Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning and the 4P’s though helpful, is simply table stakes today. It will let you keep up, but it won’t help you grow and thrive.

The core of M2C’s success and Bob's key insight is that while the traditional playbook is good, Marketing must fundamentally be re-oriented to a behavioral model, one where the behavior of the customer, understanding that behavior throughout the buying journey is the key to unlocking growth, even in highly competitive product categories. As Bob likes to put it, “how a customer buys determined what they buy.”

This growth potential is reinforced and accelerated by the tools and methods that come only in the digital marketers tool kit. In fact, I think it’s what makes digital B2B marketing really understandable in the context of materials.

Companies that choose to reorient their marketing models, stand to gain significant competitive advantage and leverage the growing digital arsenal of tools, but only if they commit to this new approach. Everyone who doesn’t could be at a significant disadvantage.

Get ready to have your thinking turned upside down as we speak with Bob Lurie here at Material Growth.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com

Welcome to our next episode of Material Growth, a podcast of the Material Growth Network hosted by Substack. Find the network at materialgrowth.substack.com and join a community of entrepreneurs and business developers who are focused on growth and business-building in the materials industry.

Today’s episode is an Executive Roundtable that we hosted last year, with guest speaker Catherine Keenan.

Catherine is a member of the Board of Directors of Agilyx AS, an advanced plastics recycler. Previously, she was Head of Sustainability, Public Affairs and EHS for Trinseo, a $5B materials company. She is the Founder of her own consulting firm, Catherine C. Keenan Consulting which specializes in sustainability and ESG.

With 30+ years in the Chemical industry, Catherine has deep expertise in sustainability strategy development and ESG. She has built global sustainability programs with disclosure/public reporting aligned with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). She led the setting of 10-year sustainability goals for two global companies, and has positioned companies for improved scores on Environmental/Social/Governance (ESG) ratings frameworks.

Sustainability is THE hot topic in materials today. You can’t turn around but see a chemical company announcing a sustainability report or new initiative based on sustainability. But are all sustainability initiatives created equal? Where are the pitfalls or mirages in sustainability? I can’t think of a better person to help answer some of that than Catherine.

We touch on a variety of topics related to sustainability including: ESG Goal setting, Net Zero and climate initiatives, Product innovation, and the Circular Economy.

Get ready to have your thinking turned upside down as we speak with Catherine Keenan here at Material Growth.

Show Notes

* Video Replay - July 21, 2022 10 am ET

* Executive Roundtable for Materials Growth website

* Executive Summary

* Slides presented during interview

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com

Today’s episode is an Executive Roundtable that we hosted at the end of last year, with guest speaker Terry Kaufman. Terry Kaufman is the Director of Strategy at Formerra, a $1B plastics distributor spun out of Avient Corporation. Formerly, he was Director of Inside Sales at Avient and former Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing and Customer Experience. He’s spent the last decade working at the intersection of marketing, sales, and technology building digital ecosystems to accelerate B2B growth.

We all know digitalization is becoming more critical in our industry. It’s harder though to really get a sense of how digital is upending the way sales is done. In many quarters sales is still a relationship, face-time game. In order to help you visualize the change, I wanted to visit with a group that has centered their work around digital tools to understand how traditional approaches to sales have to be modified.

You'll see in our discussion, Terry's group doesn't just use digital to do sales the same way it's been done, it requires not only new tools, but new processes, new organizational design and new culture.

When I was thinking about what kind of guest was right for today’s show, I was looking for someone who had spent his career in Digital, and someone who was a digital native. Frankly, when I talk to executives my age, we’re … best ways to put it is “behind” - when it comes to digital. I think Terry has unique insights to share on theses trends.

Get ready to have your thinking turned upside down as we speak with Terry here at Material Growth.

Show Notes

* Video Replay - July 19, 2022 10 am ET

* Executive Roundtable for Materials Growth website

* Executive Summary

* Slides presented during interview

* Chief Martec - tech stack landscape

* Related White Paper: Going Digital - Why the Materials Industry Struggles

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com

Today’s episode is an Executive Roundtable that we hosted at the end of last year, with guest speaker Bob Eckert. Bob is CEO at New & Improved LLC where he focuses on helping organizations harness and develop the innovative brain power of their people to deliver new and improved results.

He has written extensively about innovation leadership, authoring numerous books and articles including his book: More Lightning, Less Thunder: How to Energize Innovation Teams. Organizations that have benefited from his organizational and leadership development work include: General Electric, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes-Benz, TE Connectivity, Kimberly Clark, and many others.

I was first introduced to Bob and his practice over a decade ago, and it was transformational for me. As a Marketing executive, I worked for much of my career at the interface of operating existing businesses and developing new ones, and have often encountered this phenomena of a well-run businesses being unable to effectively incubate new businesses at the same time. That’s actually a very common phenomena.

Bob’s work in the creativity space has focused on disseminating findings about the neurochemical links to creativity, what are the essentials of creativity behaviors, and what sort of organizational cultures foster creativity and creative problem solving. We discuss what is at the core of creativity, why organizational culture is so critical to fostering innovation, what happens when companies have innovation processes without that culture foundation, and innovation beyond R&D.

Get ready to have your thinking turned upside down as we speak with Bob Eckert here at Material Growth.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com

Welcome to the first episode of Material Growth, a podcast of the Material Growth Network hosted by Substack. Find the network at materialgrowth.substack.com and join a community of entrepreneurs and business developers who are focused on growth and business-building in the materials industry.

Today’s episode is an Executive Roundtable that we hosted at the end of last year, with guest speaker Dr. Rajshree Agarwal. Dr. Agarwal is the Rudolph Lamone Chair of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, and Director of the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland. She studies the evolution of industries as fostered by the twin engines of innovation and enterprise.

This is a very special episode for me firstly because Rajshree is a good friend, but more importantly because of the criticality of her research. Like many people of my generation who are focused on innovation and growth, I was highly influenced by the narrative of creative destruction proposed by Joseph Shumpeter and popularized as “disruptive innovation” by Clayton Christensen, author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. The basic narrative is that new industries are pioneered by new entrants that upend the old industries, and that incumbents are mostly inertial players, struggling to responding effectively.

Rajshree’s research over the last 2 decades takes a fresh look at new industry development and really rewrites the narrative. She takes a much more holistic view of new industry ecosystems and finds a more nuanced narrative in an ecosystem of collaboration. She finds critical roles for incumbents, and established firms from other industries as well as startups. And she takes a more detailed look at the motivations and actions of individuals as they transfer knowledge across firms in that ecosystem.

Get ready to have your thinking turned upside down as we speak with Rajshree Agarwal here at Material Growth.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com

Welcome to the first episode of Material Growth, a podcast of the Material Growth Network hosted by Substack. Find the network at materialgrowth.substack.com and join a community of entrepreneurs and business developers who are focused on growth and business-building in the materials industry.

Today’s episode is an Executive Roundtable that we hosted at the end of last year, with guest speaker Dr. Rajshree Agarwal. Dr. Agarwal is the Rudolph Lamone Chair of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, and Director of the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland. She studies the evolution of industries as fostered by the twin engines of innovation and enterprise.

This is a very special episode for me firstly because Rajshree is a good friend, but more importantly because of the criticality of her research. Like many people of my generation who are focused on innovation and growth, I was highly influenced by the narrative of creative destruction proposed by Joseph Shumpeter and popularized as “disruptive innovation” by Clayton Christensen, author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. The basic narrative is that new industries are pioneered by new entrants that upend the old industries, and that incumbents are mostly inertial players, struggling to responding effectively.

Rajshree’s research over the last 2 decades takes a fresh look at new industry development and really rewrites the narrative. She takes a much more holistic view of new industry ecosystems and finds a more nuanced narrative in an ecosystem of collaboration. She finds critical roles for incumbents, and established firms from other industries as well as startups. And she takes a more detailed look at the motivations and actions of individuals as they transfer knowledge across firms in that ecosystem.

Get ready to have your thinking turned upside down as we speak with Rajshree Agarwal here at Material Growth.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materialgrowth.substack.com