Getting To The Top Of The Ladder
How to transition from the laboratory bench to the boardroom
Welcome to the November Chemical Careers Issue of The Polymerist. This issue to me is a bit special because I got a chance to interview someone I really respect both as a technical and a business leader. I think there are a few scientists and engineers out there thinking, “how do I get to that top level in my career?” I think in the short term this month’s sponsor CPS could help out.
The Polymerist Is Sponsored By:
The Great Resignation is happening as I write this and there are many job openings in the chemical industry that are not necessarily public. Reach out to a specialty recruiter like Stephanie Kemp. Send inquiries and resumes to skemp@cps4jobs.com
My Conversation With Boudewijn Van Lent
If you work in the chemical industry or you want to and you have a PhD in chemistry then this is a great start. Having a strong technical understanding of the chemical business from the technology side is a good starting position to the business side of the chemical industry. Boudewijn (B-OW-Deh-W-ayN) was an executive at GCP Applied Technologies for the concrete and cement group. He was in charge of the business unit’s global profit and loss statement or P&L with revenues of about $500-600 million per year. He didn’t get there through the traditional route of Harvard Business School and management consulting, but rather he got there through the lab.
Boudewijn has taken a new role at DuPont Sustainable Solutions, a consulting spinoff of DuPont. He advises executives of chemical companies both in the U.S. and internationally on Operational Improvements, Operational Risk Management (ORM), and Sustainability. I wanted to know how he ended up as an executive and advisor to executives of chemical companies after starting his career in R&D.
So, I reached out and asked him on LinkedIn.
Boudewijn van Lent got his PhD in physical and colloid chemistry from Wageningen University & Research in 1989. He started his career at Bayer as a specialist on the technical side by developing new products and processes in Leverkusen, Germany after graduate school. After about 7-8 years of this Boudewijn was seeking something different, to be global, and that is how he ended up managing a group of scientists in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a research and development leader he was often in meetings with many of the commercial leaders within Bayer’s Polymers division (now known as Covestro).
Back in the early 90s Bayer’s Polymer division in North America, were not as big as they are today as Covestro. This was a key market for growth for Bayer and Boudewijn told me that “because I was in these meetings with the commercial leaders I was pitching ideas when they were trying to figure out how to grow the business.”
That’s how he ended up with the rubber division in Canada leading R&D efforts, application development, and he had a big request to increase sales through a technical approach. Boudewijn and his technical team doubled sales of one of the specialty products in 3 years through working closely with the sales and marketing teams. In our conversation this is what became apparent as his specialty. When Lanxess spun out of Bayer, Boudewijn was asked to head up the Technical rubber Business unit in NA and he moved into his first GM role in 2004.
Boudewijn is known for getting troubled businesses on a path towards growth and performing at a better level. He has held executive roles at many companies, including my current employer, across the chemical industry. But what advice would he give to a younger version of himself?
Advice To His Younger Self
I think the best piece of advice Boudewijn gave during our talk was, “If you want to do something, just do it well. Don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone and address projects adjacent to your field of expertise. I took this to mean that if you are going to be a scientist in the chemical industry then just do it very well. Push for the direction you want to go.
If you are going to spend your career in the chemical industry Boudewijn also told me that, “your heart better be in it.” You might spend your whole career working with a very specific type of polymer or within a specific class of chemistry and if you don’t love it then it might hinder you from doing the job well (see advice above). Further, the industry is always in flux and this means that it’s best to not get too specialized.
“You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself. You can be a specialist, but this is not the same as getting pigeonholed,” he told me. Professional chemists should be getting enough skills in their current roles to transition out if needed. Boudewijn’s example was if you started off as a polymer chemist making vinyl records for the music industry, but then CDs came onto the market. Can you jump to the polycarbonate field or can you move to other applications of vinyl, perhaps in vinyl siding or pipes?
The final piece of advice was that being a team player is important. This might sound cliché, but if you are the person who makes every team better either through your ability to motivate, bring out the creativity of others, or that can enhance communication then this is very valuable. You can be the most talented chemist in the company, but if you can’t function in a team then it doesn’t really matter. Companies are like sports teams and the higher quality team always wins.
Where The Industry Is Headed
Boudewijn spent 15 years with Bayer and over 30 years in the chemical industry. I wanted to get his take on how the chemical industry has changed since he started and where he thinks it’s headed next.
“The chemical industry has changed a lot. It has reorganized itself completely. Bayer is completely different now than when I started there. DuPont is completely different. ICI dissolved,” He told me. The age of the wide business portfolio conglomerates appears to be over and companies have organized themselves into purer plays that are specific to different end markets. This is because it gives shareholders better control over their portfolios. Instead of just being in chemicals they can target specific markets where they think there will be growth.
A big wave of change going through the chemical industry is one of sustainability. An example would be how polyurethanes were invented at Bayer (now Covestro) and with the increased volume of polyurethane mattresses, Covestro is for example figuring out how to depolymerize them back into something useful. This pressure for sustainability might come from shareholders, but there is also pressure from the public and from internal stakeholders as well. There are similar things happening at Shell and Neste in the oil and gas industry for example. Dow is attempting to make net-zero emission steam crackers. Chemical companies are investing billions into sustainability right now.
The second big thing for the chemical industry is going to be digitization. Digital twins of chemical plants and modeling reaction conditions can help de-risk new products or process trials before they happen. Results from R&D efforts in the lab can be data mined to see the bigger picture. There are also opportunities in digitization to better understand customer behavior and manage supply chains. BASF Venture Capital recently invested into bioinformatics and machine learning for AgTech. Seebo is a start-up trying to use AI to mitigate production losses via artificial intelligence. The interface between computer science and chemistry appears to be a place of growth.
Boudewijn also told me that the industry is cyclical. If you can manage the downtimes, things will ultimately come back.
Perhaps in 20 years the purer play companies will try to gain efficiency by becoming conglomerates or gain supply chain efficiency through vertical integration?
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My Conclusion
My big takeaway from my conversation with Boudewijn was that he got the majority of his training from one company, which went through it’s own series of reinvention from Bayer to Covestro. In our modern era of changing jobs every few years for that extra 10-20% pay bump, staying at a job for more than 5 years can seem crazy. I think perhaps that staying somewhere for longer than 5 years might be a good way to level up your career, especially if those above you decide to go somewhere else during the great resignation.
For those who want to go to the business side like Boudewijn, the one advantage his PhD gave him in the business world of chemicals was he was able to understand the business from a fundamental technical basis. In addition, the analytical skills obtained in a technical education are a real asset in determining critical issues and opportunities for a business.
Your PhD and professional experience as a chemist or engineer can be differentiator over a former McKinsey Consultant with an MBA from Harvard Business School.
On Wanting More
When you are a new scientist or just starting out in the chemical industry you are usually just really happy to have a job. Being able to go out to eat at a restaurant and not feeling guilt or living alone seem like real luxuries. Eventually, we all adapt to our new normal and we might want a bit more. It’s normal to want a promotion or to make more money. It’s normal to want to have more responsibility, especially if you feel that you can do better than those that are above you.
Eventually, you’ll get asked a question about what you want to do in the future. You probably already know what feels like a safe answer for your technical career track. You can also probably predict the future of what a technical career track might look like based on your coworkers and you can probably model your future compensation. For many of us, this is exactly what we want and we want it to be stable until we retire. Steve Jobs described this almost perfectly:
I think it’s OK to want more. Be honest with yourself and your family about what exactly it is that you want and why. From what I can see, the higher up you move in any company either in the chemical industry, or a law firm, or in the government the more you are going to work. If your goal is to have a weekend house on a lake where you can fall asleep to the sound of loons on the water—go for it. If you want to walk your kids to school in the morning, work for part of the day, and get started on a Beef Wellington for dinner—go for it. Half the battle is knowing what you want and communicating it to your friends and family. The other half is getting there.
For many of us conversations about our careers with our employers happen at the end of the year. I hope this issue of the newsletter brings you some value in your own career.