VictoriaM: Hi, this is Victoria Meyer.
Welcome back to The Chemical Show where Chemicals Means Business.
Today, I am bringing you a short episode that includes five key leadership lessons
learned on day one of The Chemical Summit.
So as you guys know, The Chemical Summit was held on October 8th and 9th.
The feedback was, and this is just a snapshot: Outstanding!
Enlightening!
Insightful!
So lots of great things.
If you missed it and you're feeling sad or a little bit FOMO, you know,
fear of missing out, don't worry, head on over to thechemicalsummit.Com
and get your Virtual Ticket.
We are making available to you.
Um, the ability to access recordings of our speakers and panelists,
plus any slides or contents that they shared as well as some of
the snippets of conversation that happened during the event.
You're going to have the ability to connect with other leaders in our
exclusive Chemical Summit Community.
And the opportunity to gain actionable insights to move your personal
leadership and your business forward.
Day One of the Summit covered a lot of ground.
We started with Leon DeBruyn, CEO of Lummus Technology, talking about
Lummus's transformation journey and we ended with Bonnie Tully, Chief Operating
Officer of Evonik North America, talking about culture, leadership, and more.
In between, we had some great speakers on Digitization, AI,
Marine Supply Chain and Sustainability, and even more importantly, and this
is the thing that I can't bring to you in a podcast episode is the buzz
of conversation and connections that were taking place across the attendees.
What people have said is it was one of the best chemical conferences
that they've ever attended, that they love the connections.
And that it was friendly.
And frankly, that's what The Chemical Summit is all about.
Thought Leadership, Connections, and Insights.
So today I'm bringing you some nuggets from Day One of the Summit.
Again, you can go back and you can, um, get access to a Virtual Ticket
and get some of the recordings and downloads from our speakers.
And.
Sign up for next year.
We've got our early pass already available, so you
definitely don't want to miss it.
Here we go.
Five key leadership lessons that, um, attendees gained, not just me,
I asked for some feedback from other attendees of The Chemical Summit that
they gained from our speakers and from the conversations in the room.
So first of all, In times of major challenge and
transformation, create a war room.
Um, and when your back's against the wall, there is no time for indecisiveness.
Trust your gut and keep moving.
We heard this from Leon DeBruyn.
And in fact, um, Leon shared a lot of the story of the transformation that,
um, Uh, Lummus has gone through when it went private in 2020 in the midst of
COVID to where it is today and turning it into a dynamic, innovative organization.
I'm going to give you a clip of some of Leon's speech right here.
Leon: And suddenly we had to sell our company with conditions.
So the moment I was able to get past that initial shock, I started to plan.
Wartime leadership.
If you're, if you have your back against the wall, there is no time for
efficiency and making everything perfect.
You want to be direct.
Efficacy matters in that situation.
So what, what we did immediately was we combined a team, five, six head team
of people that I knew they would take a task and it would just run forward.
And I also knew that the rest of the company would continue to operate because
if you're selling your company and you're having, you're having to meet with banks
and tell your story a hundred times, literally a hundred times to acquirers,
you still have to run your company.
You still have to make money because if you don't.
You sell a company that suddenly has completely deflated.
So that was the situation we were in.
We did that.
We formed this war team in the war room.
And we got help.
There was an investment bank that run this process, etc.
What I did not realize, and this may be my boring engineering background,
is people started to leave the company.
And of course that makes sense, but we didn't think of it.
So we suddenly had to face, how do we retain the top talent?
How do we retain the tenant that's going to take the company forward?
So all of a sudden, it was not just two tasks, now there was a third task.
And this is again where I think wartime leadership matters.
You gotta meet with the people, you gotta talk with them, you gotta hear
from them what motivates them to stay and what's the longer term story.
It forced us to think about what's the longer term story for us, get
past that problem of selling in the company, but what's our future?
VictoriaM: The other nugget of advice that came out of this was don't swim in
the data, swim where you want to succeed.
So we've heard that actually from Leon, but also in our Digitization and AI panel.
And I'm going to give you a snapshot of that panel right here.
And then lastly, is that sort of high frequency monitoring.
And that you can apply that to, think of market sentiment, but you can think of
it as, you know, running your operations where you've got like inventory tolerance.
So you can apply it right across the So you start there and say,
that's what I'm trying to achieve, that's why AI deserves to win.
Then you go back and say, right, what the hell do I need?
And if you tie that all the way back to data, then you start
saying, right, what data do I need?
What type of data processing capability do I require?
What type of data modeling do I require?
And then you start getting back to those definitions that I was confused with
earlier of, right, now I understand what data I need, what data products I need,
what data models I need, because I'm trying to stitch to something at the end.
So that's.
You know, from my lens, that's how I've looked at that question is,
to make sure we harness the data and make sure that it's productive,
is don't swim in the data.
Swim where you're trying to succeed.
Our third leadership lesson comes from our marine supply chain panel, which
talked about navigating Uncertainties and if any of you are following what's
going on in the maritime shipping world and how it affects Chemical supply
chains, you know, and if you're not paying attention You need to start.
So the lesson that came out of this was the importance of partnering inside
your firm and across your stakeholders and value chains to find solutions.
And in fact, as you know, when we talk about marine supply chain, This is a
globally connected business and what's happening in other regions dramatically
affects what's happening in North America, in Asia, in Europe, elsewhere.
We're connected and you need to know what's happening.
And the way you know what's happening is to connect, connect, engage,
and partner across the value chain.
Here, I'm going to snip it from Eric Carrero, who is the president
of the Greater Houston Port Bureau.
Eric Carrero: And we learned that actually Texas is very important to Panama because
of the trade that they have with us.
So when this delegation, we engaged and we went to Panama for a few
days, they were able to talk to us and explain to us what happened.
Last year was El Nino event.
Uh, the first time they were using the new locks on their El Nino event.
So they had less rain.
So these locks, they were taking more water.
For the vessel when they were transiting.
So because of that, then they had an issue with the water, right?
This year is La Nina event, which means that more rain, more water,
no issues, but they mentioned to us, we want to be prepared for the
next El Nino event in five years.
So what are they doing?
They're investing 1.
7 billion in the next four years to take water from a reserve
that they already identify.
And they're going to be bringing that water into the Panama canal.
Because they know transits are going to increase.
Uh, we're not going to slow down.
We need to get our vessels all the way out to Asia.
Because the market, like I said, is growing.
So they are prepared.
Once again, it's the importance of being proactive.
The importance of being engaged.
Uh, it was an issue for us.
Engaged with my members.
We went.
We conquered.
And I'm proud to say that.
We are, we cannot remain, just wait to see what's going to happen.
While the rest of the nation was waiting to see what's going to
happen with the Panama Canal.
50 of us.
We went and we had a great time.
We actually met with the U.
S.
Ambassador in Panama.
We went to the residents.
We had a great evening.
And that's something that we want to continue to do every year.
Once again, we want to start knocking that door.
We don't want them to forget about us.
The importance is we need to be proactive.
VictoriaM: Our fourth leadership lesson comes from our sustainability
panel chaired by Karen Krchnak of the American Chemistry Council.
In that panel, we talked about the importance of being good stewards
and building community partnerships.
Your best community engagement strategy is to engage and partner with your fence line
and surrounding communities around you.
Build goodwill, build strong relationships such that if, and we
hope this never happens, but if there is an incident that occurs, that that
goodwill is there, that they are there.
Your partners across the fence line in your community are there to support
you in good times and bad times.
And when not so good.
So, you know, ultimately we're focused in on sustainability and building
good sustainable relationships and good safe practices in our
facilities and with our communities.
And one of the keys with this is building a strong community engagement early.
Our fifth leadership lessons is comes from Bonnie Tully.
And I heard so many great things from people about the conversation, the
Fireside Chat that Bonnie Tully and I had.
And one of the biggest takeaways that people had was around conflict resolution.
And.
Um, basically Bonnie was talking about an inflection point that the
facility in Singapore was having it.
She was out there starting up.
It'd gone through construction and startup, and then it was
moving into steady state, which is a huge inflection point.
In the message that Bonnie shared with us was when your organization
is at an inflection point, expect some conflict, right?
It's a very natural thing, but you have to solve that conflict.
And she had a really great suggestion that worked and she
has applied it several times to solve the largest group conflicts.
Focus on the small one to one conflicts.
And in fact, they brought in a mediator and had a series of one on
one engagements, which completely turn the organization around when you move
from the biggest to the smallest and focus on frankly, controllable things,
the rest will shake out and that allows for success and opportunity and more.
So those are the 5 leadership lessons that we've got today from
Day 1 of The Chemical Summit.
I hope you've enjoyed this.
Stay tuned next week.
We're bringing you some leadership lessons from day 2 of The Chemical Summit.
And if you're interested in hearing these speeches and hearing what these
leaders talked about, head on over to thechemicalsummit.Com where you
can buy a Virtual Ticket and get access to the recordings and more.
So thank you for listening today.
Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will
talk with you again soon.