Transformation to Transition: Leadership, Legacy and The Future

Welcome to Leadership Reimagined, where game changing conversations are reshaping the world of work. I'm Janice Lag, CEO and founder of l A Group, Executive Search advisors and pioneers in redefining executive search through are unwavering commitment to helping organizations hire exceptional leaders and build inclusive environments. Today, on Leadership Reimagined, our conversation is on transformation to transition, leadership, legacy and the future, and I am delighted to welcome Jim Fetterlink, Chair and CEO of Doubt, one of the most innovative customer centered, inclusive and sustainable materials science companies in the world, survey customers across high growth markets including packaging, infrastructure, mobility, and consumer applications.

As Chair and CEO since twenty nineteen, Jim has led DOO through multiple pivotal transitions, including its successful separation from Dow DuPont, positioning a company for long term growth and achieving approximately forty billion in twenty twenty five sales. Now, as Jim prepares to retire, we're eager to explore how he has shaped Doo's success and what lies ahead as his successor. KARENS Carter takes the help. Jim, thank you and welcome to Leadship Imagine.

I am delighted to have you as our feature speaker. Thank you, Jennis, I'm very glad to be here. Well, you've had an extraordinary run guiding Dow, and I want to get into that in depth and all that you had to do, you and pivoting during tumultuous times. But let's started what sparked your ambition in this field and inspired you throughout your career.

People or events, I. Would say a little bit of both, but people probably most predominantly out of engineering school. I went to engineering school at University of Missouri where I grew up, and I got a degree in mechanical engineering. At the time, you know, end of nineteen eighty three, beginning of eighty four, we were in an oil shock, so there were not a lot of engineering jobs out there available.

The economy was pretty slow, and Dow was hiring into commercial development program for technical sales, and so I ended up joining a group here called Dow Energy, Water and Processed Products, which sold all Dow products into the utility sector, the water treatment sector and think you know public water treatment to industrial water treatment and then process industries like the chemical industry, the pulp and paper industry. At that time, the textiles industry was still big in the United States, and so there was a whole host of products that we sold.

And it was the use of my engineering degree because our job was to go into the plants and really work with the engineers and the chemists and the plants to come up with the right solutions. And that that was really a great fit for me. And I joined Dow after you know, lots of interviews with lots of different you know, Fortune five hundred companies, and my trip to Dow was just unique and different because of the engagement with people and the atmosphere here and the way Dow worked together, and so that made the difference.

And I moved to Midland, Michigan two weeks after I graduated school. And so take us through a few of the really pivotal times in your career, physicians you had, including important time in Asia that you spent there that global experience. Sure I came to after I joined Now, I was and technical sales in Atlanta. The Southeast was booming at the time, and after about four and a half five years, I was asked to come into product management or some might call it brand management up in Midland, so in charge of a line of business.

And I moved up to Midland and that was a very new experience for me. And as part of that, I was involved at a time when the world was beginning to globalize. You know. Now was kind of set up in different regions of the world, and each region had its own headquarters and its own operations and they were kind of independent.

But we decided to go to a global business model and I got engaged in some joint venture negotiations that we were having in Europe. I always assumed that I must have done okay, and I didn't offend anybody because, you know, one day my boss came in and said, you know, we were working late, and he said to me, how are you with chopsticks? And I said, I'm thinking I'm going out to get Chinese food to bring back and we're going to be here for a while, right, And he said no, no, no, he says, I've got an offer for you to go to Asia to lead a business over there.

And I was kind of floored at the time. Then it was nineteen ninety four, and so I moved to Hong Kong and I ran the energy water process product business out of Hong Kong for all of Asia Pacific. We had fourteen countries, including China, which at the time was just opening up, a couple of application labs, and a marketing, sales, technical service people all over the region. So that was a big experience for me, probably the broadest group of people to that point that I had managed.

After a few years in that job, I was invited to come back to Midland for a couple of years to run the business globally. And while I'm back in Midland, my boss at the time, Andrew Livers, called and said, hey, we'd like you to go back to Asia and run the Thailand joint venture. The Thailand joint venture was kind of a miniature version of the integrated Dow Chemical Company. We had a partner with an ethylene cracker there.

We had our plastics derivatives, we had our polyrathans, our latex, our styrenics business, so it was a miniature version of DOO. So great way to learn the integration of the company and to manage both assets and people and that territory. And while I was there, now acquired Union Carbide back in the around two thousand and one two timeframe, and Carbide was just finishing a joint venture down in Malaysia. So after three years in Thailand, I moved down to Malaysia to get that joint venture up and running and also helped you know, about one hundred and twenty five Union Carbide expats who didn't know anybody inside now Land back in the corporation, which we did very successfully.

Those are big, big experiences, and you know, along the way, there were two Asian financial crises that I went through, which was great training, you know, for coming back to the United States. I came back in two thousand and six to run the plastics business, and of course two thousand and eight, end of two thousand and eight, beginning of two thousand and nine, we had our own financial crises here. So having been through a couple of those in Asia was just great experience to have to know kind of immediately what you have to do to keep the enterprise going, but also protect the enterprise during the time like that.

So all these experiences really set you up in a company that is so complex and so global. I think a lot of your employees are long tenured employees, But you was selected to be the CEE. Was it because of all these experiences or what else happened in terms of them the board saying Jim, you're in over CEO down. I think a combination of things.

Obviously, the experiences were huge. There weren't many people that had the breadth of experiences that I'd had. You know, I would get comments from people about the leadership of the company and the board at the time really appreciating the way that I ran the business, the way I conducted my business. We weren't, you know, we were not.

We were never a business that was in trouble or had a lot of negative issues or consequences. We had a great team. We always had good morale in the organization through good times and bad. So I think those things played a factor.

And then the other thing that I think is critically important is leaders have to make commitments and they have to follow through on them. And your ability to follow through and to do the hard work that has to be done and deliver the results that you need to deliver, maybe not perfectly, but still to do what you said you were going to do. That's what the boards and that's what management teams are looking for as they choose their successor So how. Did your leadership change over these years?

You know, there are times where leadership seems relatively easy, and then there are times where getting people aligned and driving through some tough negotiations and tough combinations and split offs requires a little bit more edge. We signed the deal with Dow DuPont in December of twenty fifteen. Dow and DuPont did actually on the same day we signed the deal to buy the other half of Corning out of Dow Corning, the Silicon Enstroyed Adventures. So we were actually merging dal Corning into Dow and Dow and Dow DuPont together and we had to do some really different and creative things, and Dow and DuPont were very different cultures, and so you know, we looked at it and we said, boy, we're trying to create three companies out of two.

And we really talked about it at links with DuPont and said, this is going to be difficult. If we try to merge everybody into one company, then make a bunch of changes and then split them up, it's going to be difficult. So we did something which I thought was pretty creative. Underneath the Dow legal entity and underneath the DuPont legal entity, we divided to the companies into three businesses, the AG business, the specialties business, and the materials business.

And then Dow swapped the AG and the specialties businesses over to DuPont, and they swapped their materials businesses over to us, and that left Dow legal entity as the first one to spend out. And then DuPont took the AG business and that was the second one to spin out, and the specialties that were left with DuPont, then they decided to put them together and put them into four divisions and then do some other deals on the end of that. That took time, but it took a lot less time than if we'd try to do it the hard way of like version everybody together.

You weren't going to try to create one culture out of doing that. You're going to end up with three different companies and potentially three different cultures. So I think we did some really creative work, and along the way we had to come up with four and a half billion dollars of synergies cost synergies out of it. And I led the team that really drove getting the cost syenergies out.

So some days you were a good guy and some days you were the tough guy that was saying, where's my cost synergies? And you have it was a good learning experience. You have to do both on sometimes the same day, but you have to do it in a way that doesn't it's constructive and doesn't create a lot of animosity in the group. So talk weak to us a little bit about also Dow sustainability initiatives, because you've had a role as a founding member of the Alliance and Plastic Waste to launch its next generation sustainability goals.

So how do you in the company being true to these priorities through all of these pressures culturally, geopolitically, all the changes. There's a long history and a long commitment to this that really goes back to the nineteen eighties timeframe, and if you think about the industry, it really goes back to the nineteen seventies when Rachel Carson wrote the book Silent Spring, and when President Nixon created the EPA. From that point forward, there's been a lot of pressure on industry, chemical industry, but others included to clean up the way we operate air emissions, water emissions, ground contamination and now has for more than thirty years, had sets of ten year goals that we put forward that they would include employee health and safety, they would include environmental impact and voluntary reporting.

We've been voluntary reporting for more than twenty years and you know, are are highly recognized in the external world in terms of the transparency of what we put out there. So directionally, we've only been going one direction, which is lower air emissions, cleaner water, better better management of the water shed around the places that we operate, and on plastics both circularity and of course now dealing with waste and circularity is a big part of that. You know, let's move away from a once through throwaway society into one that recycles more, brings it back terms of into virgin materials, but also does what plastics were designed to do, which is make products with less materials lighter, cheaper, faster, stronger, and that's one of the things that makes them so you know, in demand and so interesting.

Whether it's in electric vehicles or internal combustion engine vehicles or your electronics or or whatever, they play a role there. So we've always been committed, and I think of it this way as the north Star hasn't really changed. We deal with changes in administrations, you know, every four or eight years, depending on you know, how the elections go, but generally there's a middle path that kind of defines, you know, where we're headed for the long term, and we try to stay true to that and try to make sure that the company knows what our objectives are.

And our customers are the ones that are really the biggest barometer because they're brand owners. People don't realize if I took you to a grocery store or Walmart, or you went through the Amazon website and we walked through it. It's in. Our products are in everything you touch and use every day.

So our customers feel the same pressures from the consumers. And it's a global situation about you know, selection of materials that they want their health and beauty care products made of, selection of materials that they want to use in things like paints and coatings, how they use their plastics, and recyclability. So we work with those brand owners to make sure that we're helping them also meet their commitments. It won't change and the companies committed to it and I think for a lot of people, I think they would be extremely surprised and hopefully impressed at how much commitment there is in the employee base here to continually do it better.

So you're saying, though than among the oldest over three point thousand individuals you have worldwide, there is a mission that they believe that in terms of sustainability, and it permeates throughout all levels. Huge give you an example, we had a program we put together, actually it was planned and laid out during COVID, but we put together a path what we called a path to zero, which in our operations we generate a lot of power and steam, and we use a lot of fossil fuels to fire our furnaces that make ethylene which makes polyethylene, so our emissions are pretty sizable from a COE two standpoint.

But we devised a path that stretched out to twenty fifty and we said, here's a plan on how we get emissions to zero by twenty fifty and everybody you know, we put it out there, and behind that plan there were projects at every one of our plant sites to get us there, and on the power side, some of them coincided with end of life of an existing power asset and replacing it with the best available technology. But then there were some very creative things that we were doing on the ethylene cracking side, which was taking waste by products and putting them through an autothermal transformer to make pure hydrogen to then fire the furnaces.

And when you fire with pure hydrogen, you have no CO two emissions. Kind of a unique opportunity for our industry because of the quantity and the scale of things that we do. So we can take a site like our site up in Alberta and completely turn a site that produces over three and a half million tons a year of product with no CO two emissions. I tell you that that's inspiring for people.

But it also when you go to hire young engineers out of college and you talk to them about what you're doing in circularity, You talk to them about what you're doing on emissions, you talk to them about what you're doing in water conservation and watershed management. They know they're coming into a company to make and sell products, but they're also coming into a company that's got a bigger purpose and to try to do it in a way that makes us preferred with our customers. And puts us out front.

And when you do that, it opens doors for them to be able to do their job. A customer hears about what Dalla's doing and they want to go call on somebody and get a new piece of business, They're more likely to get the appointment and to have the door open because they want to understand what Dao's doing and how we can help. So with the in the age of AI and people talking about your jobs going away and a number will is this a good career for individuals going into from engineering, going and going to redoubt is a long term career that they can look at.

I still think it is. We work in the physical world, and I would say AI is going to be very important to us, and already is very important to us. But we also make a physical product. And what I mean when I say that eighty percent of the United States economy is a service's economy.

And so let's think about a company like Uber. Their product is really devising new applications and things that they can offer to you. So it's it's created digitally, it's delivered through drivers and vehicles, but the products created digitally. In our case, the product may be created digitally but physically you have to make the physical product because you've got to make you know, ultimately a piece of furniture or a piece of packaging, or a car or a computer, or you know, the equipment for a data center, or the insulation and cabling that goes into high voltage transmission lines.

So there will always be a role for skilled workers, engineers and people and researchers and chemists to do that work. AI is going to change the way they do their work, and is already changing the way they do their work dramatically. But it's not going to replace the physical side of things. It'll complement it greatly.

And you are using you are embracing AI sheet learning as I understand it correct absolutely. In manufacturing, you know, we use it a lot for preventive maintenance. We use robotics and an AI for inspections. I give you an example.

To go inside our plants and do maintenance, you have to do ten thousand and confined space entries every year. Confined space entries means somebody has to dress up in a hazmat suit and go inside and inspect a vessel. We do ninety six percent of that stuff now with robots and cameras and AI and calculations that takes that many people in that many hours out of the safety equation, right, So it really has a massive impact on safety. In research.

For thirty years, we've been using high speed throughput technology that was created in the pharma industry back in the nineties, simics technology that we brought in here. So now if you want to make a plastic package for a customer, we've got thirty years worth of digital data of all the research that we've done, so before we ever even go to the lab to try to make something, we go crunch the data. And the way I always describe AI to people in terms of these new models is you're running very low charge probabilistic models that get you to a ninety nine point nine to nine plus percent accuracy.

And what that does for a researcher is it really narrows the field to help them focus, and then it speeds up the time for them to commercialize a new product. And we're starting to see applications of this and the legal function, you know, for people that do intellectual property legal work to help them in the finance function. Obviously, there's going to be some big benefits in customer service. You know, customer service rep has AI assistance and agents to help them out these days.

So it is it is everywhere in the organization. You are embracing it. And now you need to be embracing retirement after all these years at dow and be CEO. So when you look back on your leadership and how that has changed, and also you probably come out at work and how is that shaped you as a leader and people have opened out to you, I mean many years of now your authenticity, authenticity is clear to us.

A little bit about that leadership for you over the years. You know, that was that was a pivotal moment for me for a couple of reasons. I am back in two thousand and eight nine and it was during that financial crisis and at the time we were going to spin out portion of the business into a company called k Dow and that was going to facilitate dow By and roman Haus, and the financial crisis kind of scuttled that. I was diagnosed at that time with stage four cancer and working through some massive surgeries and also almost the years worth of chemo and a financial crisis at the same time, and unwinding that deal because it didn't go through, which would end up being great experience for me for dal DuPont later on.

But in the process of all that, I just kind of had a chance to ref liked on life and say, you know, there's some stresses that I can eliminate, and one of them is not trying to keep my personal life outside of the company and try to, you know, live as a gay person outside of work separately from how I lived my life inside work. And so I made the decision to come out. And in talking to I've said this before been in talking to Andrew at the time, I was I knew I was considered or a candidate to at some point become COEO, and I said, hey, I'm a little bit worried about how the board of view that, and he said, don't worry about it at all.

He said, if you're and if you're really concerned, just to go see each one of the board members and talk to them. And so I did, and to a person, they all said, we're proud of you for doing it. You're doing the right thing. We're absolutely supportive.

Don't think twice about it. So I came out at work on a webcast to fifty three thousand employees, which is a pretty daunting thing to do. And as I say to people, the response was so overwhelming, like ninety nine plus percent positive. If I got one or two negative emails, I don't remember them.

I would be surprised. It made a difference for me. But it also kind of lifted the lid on a conversation and made things easier to talk about at work, and that helped the work environment. And I think coming out of that, you know, I've had people say that both through you know, surviving cancer and having battled through that and coming out they could see a change in, you know, the way I approached things, a little more patience in dealing with people, a lot more empathy in dealing with people, because you just don't know what somebody's going through on any given day, and if you've been through a few challenges like that, you're more likely to be able to relate to them and give them the spaces and support that they need to navigate.

So that was around the two thousand and eight two thousand and nine period, Right, Wow, that was a lot, but you know that authenticity was so strong, and you know, last year TLC Lions, which is a group that talks about getting the most human awards, most Human Company, the most Human HR leader, most Human CEO. You received and I gave you that report, I announced it. You were chosen as the most Human CEO. And I can see why, given in such a complex world that you worked in and all the issues that you dealt with, how your leadership really you know, meant so much to others and why they would tell their story about why you should get this award.

So I think humanness in companies and where people can relate and see everybody's vulnerable to something. You know, you want to bring your whole self to work. Oftentimes it's hard if the leader can't relate or talk to you. And it seems like you've broken that barrier down at doubt.

So congratulations. I mean that's a huge thing to do, but it means so much to the many employees. And you know, I just did a podcast about trust in government is not existent and in companies that's where people are looking, you know, right or having that communication, that compassion you know, and then your CEO you have followership. People want to follow you right because they know you care about them.

I think a couple, I mean a couple of things that I learned along the way, both from the international experiences and from those health and coming out experiences that we talked about is and we're we're in an environment right now where big swings back and forth on DEI and these things are becoming politicized, and we haven't changed course at what we're doing here because it was never about the politicization. It was about creating an environment where people want to come to work every day and they can be their best selves, attracting the best talent, and you never you don't know where the best talent is going to come from.

You don't know what school, you don't know what background, what country they're going to come from. So you need to be open to bringing in and seeing as many people as you can to get the best talent. Culturally, when I went Overseas the first time, I had a pretty good HR manager in Hong Kong, and you know, you're in a different world, and you know, she said something that was pretty impactful, which is when you're dealing with culture, it isn't right or wrong, it's just different.

You know, our culture is different from the Middle East culture, is different from Chinese culture. It's more important that you understand, you know, the similarities and the differences, but everybody gets hung up on the differences, and in the reality, we're eighty five ninety percent the same and it's small differences that drive a wedge in everything. And the second thing was there's very simple principles that you have to deal with, and number one is treat others the way that you want to be treated.

The golden rule is in every religion in this world and some form of it. It's a simple thing. It's it's hard sometimes to practice, but if you carry that through the way you do your business, people are going to want to do business with you. And customers make choices every day.

They make choices based on quality, price, technical service of a product. But there's one other thing they make a choice about. They decide if they want to do business with you. And sometimes they decide because they look at how you work with each other and how you treat each other, and they look at that and they say, if those guys operate like that with each other, then that's an extension of how they're going to operate with me.

Oh, that's such a good example. It's so true. You know, when you walk into a company you can feel you can feel the culture right, and so when you're calling on clients, they can feel how you the collaboration that is there or not there among the workers. That's really interesting.

So you're about to hand over the reins to Karen went through a succession planning process is every word does what are Karen's greatest strengths and how do you feel about now the next chapter that's going to be For doubt. I feel very comfortable. Karen's got great followership. She's a great human being.

She's worked through, you know, her own challenges, but the way she deals with people with respect and values people is a parent every day. I think it makes people feel comfortable about the transition that's about to happen. She's where I come from, more of an engineering background. She comes from more of a business technical background.

She also had a few years as our chief Inclusion and chief HR officer, so she knows the people aspect of the whole company globally, which I think is super powerful. And some of the things that she's going to be tackling, you know, maybe less on the engineering side and more on the commercial side and more on the AI side, and how you harness that to drive growth in the company. So I feel good about that. It was a very deliberate process with the board.

We started a little over three years ago, and at the time we had a few candidates that we were looking at to become the next Chief Operating officer. That's an important decision for us because when you become COO, you're one step away and you're really in the middle of running the day to day environment. And she's been doing that for the last eighteen months. So you know, I don't want to I don't want this to sound trite, and I don't mean it that way, but when you become COO, it's yours.

If you perform right, it's it's yours, and she's performed. One of the other things we did was, you know, we worked with a really strong outside group to put together a program that she's been leading called Transformed to Outperform, which looks at the whole company and the way we do our work and to end as well as the way we're structured, trying to set new competitive standard for performance both financial costs as well as the way we do you know, everything inside the company.

And that's been a great learning experience for her along the way, because you have to go through the whole company with a fine tooth comb. So she's going to come out of that into this transition on July one and have everything laid out to be very successful. And the other thing that I committed to do for her is I helped her to make the change in leadership teams. So on July one, when she starts, her leadership team is in place.

She doesn't have to spend six months or a year doing that. And any any changes or discussions from my team to her team, you know, I would take care of that so that she's ready to move forward. Well, congratulations to the board into you and of Chris Karen. Because I do as a search consult I do believe that if you can have successors seen in many seats, it is far better to go internal.

Particularly a company is complex as down but in many companies as well. So if you prepare people by having them sit in many seats, they're there, they can take over and continue to a great culture and a great company. So going forward, for you, what are your plans? When do you want to do next?

Because you're obviously been very after your whole career, continue to do other great initiatives what might be look like. Yeah, I will probably you know, I serve on the three M board. I'm the lead director there, which I'll continue to do as executive chair for now. This is not going to be a long term thing.

There's a couple of projects that I have primarily to work on for the board. We're renegotiating some terms with our Saudi joint venture and I've got a long relationships there, so I want to get that wrapped up so that I can hand that over to Karen. And then we have a small modular nuclear project going down in Texas with x Energy and the Department of Energy, and so I want to get that to a point where I can hand that over to Karen. But this is all going to be kind of near term stuff.

At that point I might take on another board. I've been supporting some research work for for a number of years with you know, my doctor who did all of my cancer surgeries in Pittsburgh, and we've been looking at, you know, pathways to treat this with immunotherapy and other things so people don't have to go through some of the horrific surgeries that I had to go through and others have to go through to survive this. I've been engaged with my alma mater both on We created a Precision Health Center at the University of Missouri, which is doing tremendously well.

And now we're working on a synergy for Center for Energy Excellence, which is you know, addressing you know, these power demands and needs that we're going to have, not just in the United States but around the world and looking at those technologies. So I'm kind of passionate about that space. And then some of it will be real retirement, you know, travel and do some things and you know, see some friends that I've made over the years that i haven't seen in a while. Time with family, and but I will stay engaged.

I do want to keep the brain working, and I think I've got a lot to contribute to. The CEO role today is very difficult. So I'm sure you have many friends people that you have not seen. It really daunting in terms of what CEOs and boards contending within the speed or change.

But you're leaving now in a very great place, and so I would ask you to any final thoughts for our audience or to your now leaders and workers globally that you want to say. The first thing I'd like to say to them is that it's just been a real pleasure to work with them for almost forty three years now. I'm very proud of the company. The company's got a very strong culture, very can do attitude, and they need to maintain that.

You've always got to keep your mind set that we can solve any problem, even the most challenging problem, and I think that keeps things positive and moving forward. The volatility in the world is not going to decrease, so we need to be eyes wide open about that. I think that's what's made the jobs difficult more lately is the breadth of the jobs, the amount of time that you have to spend dealing with this volatility, and the amplitude and the magnitude of the volatility is greater than anything we've seen.

I said to Karen, I said, the toughest part of the CEO job is it's easy to get sucked into the day to day, the here and the now, to make the quarter side of things, but you also have to have things in flight for five years, seven years, ten years out and you're the only one in the seat that's going to be looking at what do I have in motion that's going to be coming good in that time period, and so you have to carve out that time to do that for the company, because when you get into these jobs sometimes you're playing more defense than you expect.

As a CEO, you spend more time trying to defend the enterprise than driving it forward, and you can't. You've got to do both. Jim Ferriling, your legacy will continue for years to come. You've reshaped out into a more innovative, forward booking company which also truly demonstrated what it means to lead with purpose, inclusion and authenticity.

And what you said today was so empowering I think for others to hear treat others the way you want to be treated. You know it sounds simple, it isn't, but you've done that and your impact your leadership really will be felt across now the industry, but many people that you touched and inspired along the way. So thank you for being with us today sharing your very personal professional and personal story. And I just so appreciate what you have done as a leader and now look forward to seeing Karen at her role.

So thank you for being with us today very much. Well, thank you, Janets. It's been a pleasure and I've really enjoyed talking with you. I'm looking forward to the next chapter, and I hope you get a chance to talk to Karen sometime soon.

I will thank you and to our audience, thank you for tuning in to another game changing conversation on leadership reimagine. If you can find me on LinkedIn or visiting us at elgroup dot com. Thank you for joining us today.