Welcome to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of diversified solutions across senior-level executive search, leadership, assessment and development, team and organizational effectiveness, and culture shaping. Every day, we speak with leaders around the world about how they're meeting rising expectations and managing through volatile times, thinking about individual leaders, teams, organizations, and society. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Louis Besland: Hi, I'm Louis Besland, partner at Heidrick & Struggles, leading the global chemical sector. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Michael Lefenfeld, the president and CEO of chemical manufacturing company Hexion. He's been in the role since January 2023, driving business transformation, industrial modernization, and high growth strategies.

Michael is also chairman of the Board of Directors of Hexion and serves as a member of the Board of Managers for AP Resins. He holds more than a hundred patents that are intended to address some of the world's most pressing environmental and sustainable product-related challenges. Prior to joining Hexion, Michael served as president and CEO of Cyanco International, the world's largest manufacturer of gold and silver extraction materials.

Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.

Michael Lefenfeld: Thank you for having me today. I'm looking forward to this. 

Louis Besland: So, Michael, to kick us off, how have you seen the chemical industry evolve over the last five years? There's been a lot of changes in terms of sustainability, digital, AI, how has the chemical industry evolved? 

Michael Lefenfeld: I think what we're seeing now through the industry is really a move towards bold action. Sustainable practices are being embedded in our everyday processes. The products being sustainable are being higher adopted out in the market as the consumer and the industry are looking for better options than just sort of impactful chemicals in a negative way.

When it comes to digitization and AI, as we see in the news every day, it is just a game changer for everything we do and how we operate. Predictive quality control, real time optimizations, better analysis for forward looking planning is really an established change that's coming with the movement in AI and automation and digitization.

Louis Besland: When you think about your own companies, what are your strategic priorities right now as it relates to those topics?

Michael Lefenfeld: When it comes to sustainability, Hexion is an amazingly sustainable organization. So, sustainability is embedded in our DNA. We're constantly looking at better ways and smarter ways to make our products and utilize them and get them to the place of use in the best way possible. I wouldn't say it's just our strategy, but like I said, it's really foundational in everything we do.

When it comes to AI, this is a very active area that we are driving through the organization through education, short courses, and contests.

Hexion actually just completed an AI-enablement contest where we asked all of our associates through the organization to come up with ways that AI can transform the business that we do every day, whether it's tactical to really transformational ideas. We got hundreds of submissions from all parts, all geographies in the organization.

I like to tell our team that if you're not using AI, you're probably, you know, not doing your job in the best way possible. We run AI through HR. It's to make sure that it's a core focus in our everyday. I sort of use the analogy if you go to your doctor and he's diagnosing you of some condition or something along those lines, you want your doctor to use all the best equipment, all the best resources to make the most accurate and the most relevant diagnosis they can make. AI is that type of enabler in the business that we conduct in every function.

So, I want our team to use those tools that can make them the best they can be in everything they do, and that's how we look at the use of AI. 

Louis Besland: The industry is not so much recognized to be the fastest adopter of AI technology, and you seem to be one of the pioneers in that field.

How would you suggest to your peers, or what would you give as advice to your peers in that respect? 

Michael Lefenfeld: We've tried to flatten our organization so that everybody has a seat at the table for making decisions, because building from the bottom up is more important than me coming up with wild ideas and trying to tell the organization they should implement those ideas without knowing exactly how that business, you know, will benefit or be hurt by some of those changes in those ideas.

We have mandated across the organization that every new hire must have some familiarity with AI. They don't have to know how to code, but you know, understanding prompt dynamics and understanding how to enhance their thought process and their data gathering using AI is a critical function to succeed at Hexion and through our transformation that we have had over the last few years, we have driven significant value through process change, and you don't want to just put AI on top of any process that you have in an organization. You really want to use the AI enablement to review and revise all of your processes, which is a little traumatic to an organization that's been around like Hexion for 150 years.

But you should take a look at every process for what it is now, what the organization is doing, and how it's executing, and then do that refinement and then put AI layers through that new process and really do that scrub from the bottom up. 

Louis Besland: And thinking about leadership roles, because that's usually where it's more, maybe, difficult to adopt this new technology with the seniority, people maybe being less agile around that, how did you develop your leadership and the leadership talents that exist around you? 

Michael Lefenfeld: The chemical industry and the petrochemical industry, and even the oil and gas industry, have always been technologically enabling, having inline sensors and having continuous improvement and having devices that can tell us, because what we do can sometimes, if done improperly, can be unsafe. Right? There's a lot of energy in our manufacturing. There's a lot of foreign materials in our manufacturing. And by doing that type of constant look of technological enablement to make sure things are working the right way, in the right process, at the right conditions, in the right quality every time, really allows this industry to lean into these types of changes.

I don't want to say Hexion is different than a lot of the other companies out there, because there are ones that are doing such a tremendous job in enabling that adoption in the highest way. Our team has leaned into that. Mind you, they do have a CEO that does ask a lot of questions and pushes in a firm way.

You know, I tell my team constantly that we need to always strive for perfection, knowing we may never achieve it. You have to have that resourcefulness in the DNA of all of our team members across the organization because perfection is the hardest thing, as we all know, to achieve. And you have to be willing to live with the frustration of not being able to achieve it, although we're trying to constantly.

Louis Besland: And did you have to add or rescope some roles to make that happen? 

Michael Lefenfeld: We have. There's a lot of new people throughout Hexion, but we promoted wherever we could. We wanted the internal knowledge and the internal capability and the people that have had the relationships with all of our partners around the world. We wanted to make sure we kept that as a thorough variable through the organization, but we have brought in people and talent in all functions in all areas and we are making sure that we are reinforcing that with the right people and the right culture at every level.

Louis Besland: And looking forward, what skills and experience do you believe will be most important for the next generation of leaders in the chemical industry? 

Michael Lefenfeld: I'm going to be a little bit negative on this statement. I am a very big believer that the younger generation is smarter than their older generations. But I always do push back a little bit that they may not go deep enough in certain areas and understanding.

I compared it being a scientist and spending a lot of my early years in the lab and in the science invention area; I remember the generation that was my generation and the generation older than me, we had to spend time actually tuning a lot of the devices that took the measurements that we wanted to get the answers to understanding the molecule or understanding the system we were looking at.

And now the technology, because of all of the innovation in technology and process and controls, a lot of it is, you know—you push a button and you get an answer and nobody really knows how the system works. And it really is critical to understand how the system's working so you know the answer you're getting is right every time.

So, I would say that the younger generation, it would be important for them not to just be wide, but also to go deep in the areas that they are truly passionate about. I think that is critical. I want to also make sure that people really focus on making sometimes very quick decisions. A lot of organizations, especially large organizations, get bogged down in analysis, and at Hexion we like to say that if a decision is reversible, changing an organizational structure or changing a process to perform a result, if you can afford the cost of the reversibility, which is usually time or money, and you can afford that, you should walk through the door, make the change, try it. If it doesn't work out, you'll have learned something and you can walk back through the door, reverse it with the newfound intelligence, and put it back together in a better way than it was when you first started.

Louis Besland: Thank you, Michael, for your advice. Thank you for all your very wise comments and thank you having answered all the questions. 

Michael Lefenfeld: Thank you so much. I really appreciated this. This was a lot of fun. 

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About the interviewer

Louis Besland (lbesland@heidrick.com) is partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ Industrial and CEO & Board of Directors practices; he is based in the London office.