Material Growth Podcast

Discover strategies to transform team dysfunction into collaboration and performance with insights from Bob Johnson, PhD.

Teams where members feel that everyone “has your back” are rare. Whether it’s teams on fast-paced project teams or executive teams full of ego and co-opetition, dysfunction is so often the norm that we become resigned to it. It doesn’t have to be that way, and in fact it’s a critical competitive advantage if it’s...

This recording is of a seminar I did a few months ago to a group of C-Suite Executives.

Seminar Summary: Mastering Influence for Effective Leadership and Change

The ability to influence effectively has become the essential skill for executives across all sectors. This seminar focuses on the pivotal role of influence in executive roles, offering insights that can reshape your approach to leadership and organizational change. Lack of e...

With geo-political instability in global markets and uncertainty around development of growth trends such as sustainability, effective decision making in highly uncertain environments is crucial today in the materials sector.

Paul Strzelec and I discuss why a planning mindset is critical to execute on growth, including:

* why planning is a crucial component of strong execution

* how to view planning in the face of dynamic and uncertai...

Goal setting is a common activity at the beginning of the year.

But, it’s usually dominated with business objectives.

All that time invested to benefit... your company. ?!

Instead, let’s invest some of that time and take a few minutes to work on the activities you need to advance your career in 2025.

In this 50 minute workshop we’ll help you think about some of the topics and activities you’ll need to make substantive career progress t...

Modern digital innovations have radically altered the ways customers research and buy products, making it more convenient and cost-effective for companies to engage with them at any stage of the buying process. It’s widely recognized that companies that ignore or dabble in digital engagement are far less able to connect with customers. Yet it’s equally costly when companies aggressively add digital methods into activation efforts b...

This month’s podcast episode is a webinar we did last month on consultative selling. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we have dealt with that topic in a past episode.

This episode is unique however for 2 reasons:

* I deal here with the fatal flaw in value selling. It’s one that you can’t recover from, and one that makes consultative selling uniquely qualified to deal with today’s B2B sell. This topic was not covered at all in t...

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The truth is, companies struggle with executive development. 

At most firms, learning executive skills is still mostly done by observation. It's a lot like watching submarine maneuvers from the surface. You know there’s a lot of action going ...

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Value and solution-selling are rapidly becoming table stakes in the materials industry.

Today's B2B materials buying teams are better informed than ever about their options. In fact sometimes customers are over-informed and overwhelmed. And that makes the buying process ...

Fred Moesler serves as the Chief Technology Officer at Global Thermostat, a leading company in direct air capture. He has extensive expertise in the development and commercialization of bio-based, chemical, and hybrid processes. This includes areas such as biopolymers, biofuels, lignocellulosic deconstruction, in addition to direct air capture of carbon dioxide. He has also held leadership positions at Renmatix, NatureWorks, and Do...

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 a...

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 emp...

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 comport...

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 efficien...

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 V...

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...

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 techn...

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...

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 th...

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 th...