Listen to The Interview with Michael Here:
Transforming a 150-year-old chemical business into a technology-driven solutions provider requires both innovative thinking and strategic agility. Michael Lefenfeld, President and CEO of Hexion Incorporated, joins host Victoria Meyer to discuss the company’s evolution from its roots as Borden to leading the engineered wood industry with advanced adhesives, resins, and AI-powered manufacturing systems. Michael shares how Hexion’s focus on customer-centered solutions, digitalization, and strategic partnerships is driving rapid change, while also navigating global market pressures and evolving workforce needs.
Victoria and Michael explore the role of artificial intelligence in modern manufacturing, from boosting product quality and sustainability to supporting workforce upskilling. The conversation extends to lessons in leadership and innovation, including Michael’s advice for young professionals on staying curious and building diverse teams. This episode offers actionable insights for chemical industry professionals facing transformation and rising expectations in an increasingly complex market.
Victoria and Michael discuss the following topics:
- How Hexion evolved from a 150-year-old chemical supplier into a customer-focused, technology-driven solutions company.
- Running a chemical business with PE speed: fast decisions, strategic pivots, and compressed timelines.
- Leveraging partnerships and external innovation
- Deploying AI systems to boost operational efficiency and reshape workforce skills.
- Building successful chemical careers through curiosity, diverse thinking, and strategic humility.
Killer Quote: “We believe that there are great innovations everywhere, and we want to be partnered with the best in what they do and provide our capabilities, our strengths to make them get to market faster.” – Michael Lefenfeld
Watch Victoria Interview Michael Lefenfeld of Hexion on Youtube Here:
Transforming Hexion: CEO Michael Lefenfeld on Innovation, AI, and Leading With Customer Focus
Welcome back to The Chemical Show, where leaders talk business. Today I have the opportunity to speak with Michael Lefenfeld, who is the president and CEO at Hexion Incorporated, where he’s also the chairman of the board. Michael has a long career in chemicals and materials and innovation.
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He’s had a combination of executive, operational and entrepreneurial experience, including, by the way, holding more than 100 patents. This makes him, number one, just an interesting person to talk to. Number two, really uniquely positioned to be leading Hexion through the transformations that it’s going through. So, Michael, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Thanks for having me, Victoria.
Absolutely. So let’s just start with your origin story. How did you become interested in chemicals and materials? And how has your career path led you to where you are today at Hexion?
My origin story is a little bit different, but I think it starts with, like most technology focused folks, I was a nerd growing up and I wear that with a badge of honor. My career has always been about transforming products and industries and markets, taking things that have existed already and putting them together in novel or unique ways to make new packages of products for respective industries. I started my first company in college, which was a medical device company, filed my first patent, and then launched successful startups a few times after that, the biggest being in the chemicals industry, which I then exited and transformed my career into doing strategic growth transformations in the private equity world. As a business leader with a scientist background, I’ve been focused on transforming industry that has been a little bit more dated into modern progressive organizations with innovation and sustainability at the heart of their growth projects. So private equity is an amazing place to be. It’s a little different than entrepreneurial areas where you play every role. When you’re the first person hired in the organization here you come in with a strong balance sheet and with a great team and the world is open to you if you can align that strategy quickly and progressively. That’s really where I really love to play.
That’s awesome. I know we’ve had a few PE people on the podcast in the past and it’s always something that people are interested in. In terms of both the, how do you get into a PE backed company? So that’s usually from somebody that’s in some big, somewhat lumbrous, publicly listed company, but also this whole aspect of just really driving value and results because of course that’s where a lot of the action is.
Private equity is an interesting medium. How I got there was when I exited my chemical company after a decade of growing it, I started co-investing and sitting on boards with private equity and venture backed organizations. In my first private equity board position, I was sort of predicting the future a little bit faster than the organization itself. And the other board members from the private equity fund had asked why I was always knowing what was coming or where it was going before the team and I started to talk about that and then they asked if I’d be willing to take the CEO role of the organization. So my work with private equity started as consultancy, but then found its way into operational structure and performance. So that’s really how my start into private equity began. Working with private equity is amazing. You’re sprinting a marathon, which is hard, don’t get me wrong.
Right.
Because private equity has a five year timeline on average from start to their exit. So you’ve got to achieve your growth, your operational excellence, your safety improvements, your strategic shifts, all in a very small amount of time. It’s not a very long tenure where public companies have a lot more time to steer that ship around. And as the larger organizations go, the trick is to make them as nimble and as operationally excellent as possible.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s a good segue into Hexion. Let’s talk a little bit first of all, just about who and what is Hexion, because some of our folks may not be familiar with the company.
So Hexion is actually over 150 years old. We used to be called Borden. We were founded by a gentleman named Gail Borden who actually invented condensed milk.
Okay. I was going to ask if it was the dairy connection.
It was the dairy company. Of course now we’re in chemicals. But they used to have Elmer’s Glue, Cracker Jacks, they used to have fast food restaurants. It was an amazingly diverse organization. And then the name changed years ago and we became Hexion. It’s still a little bit frustrating, I’m not gonna lie. In Columbus, Ohio, when you get in a taxi at the airport and say, take me to the Hexion building, which has our big name on it, taxi drivers still look at you like you have three heads. If you tell them to take you to the Borden building, they know exactly where to go.
So we’re still working on that branding opportunity in the community.
But that’s amazing, and how long has it been Hexion as a company?
Over a decade.
Okay, that’s what I thought.
Yeah, and we’re a global producer of adhesives and performance materials. We have locations all over the world, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio and we have just under 1500 associates in the organization. So we are the world’s pioneers in what are called resins, which is basically a different type of glue for engineered wood products. And we work in the building and construction market majority. We also have products in agriculture and oil and gas and automotive and coatings and paints and things like that. But our big business falls into the building and construction markets.
Got it, makes sense. So you’ve been at Hexion now for a few years and you’ve really been leading it through a significant period of transformation. So I know you talked about being PE backed and just how that drives fast movement, fast decisions, fast results. But can you describe some of that transformation and what really prompted it?
Yeah. Hexion and prior Borden was built on the backbone of innovation and purposeful innovation. Through Hexion’s history, its had some ups and downs. In the last decades it has become a little bit less investing into its pioneering research, and so at Hexion we are focusing on transforming what we would define as a more commoditized chemical supplier into a solutions focused, technology enabled provider to lead the manufacturing industry of engineered wood and construction and building products. This shift’s been one driven by our customers, what our customers need, and we are 100% customer focused. So we have decided those solutions should be fully enabling to make sure that their product processes and their products are to the highest quality and the highest spec by including systems through our acquisition with smart tech, AI based systems, as well as improving our products to be the fastest curing the strongest bonding materials that can be made for wood product engineering. By investing in these data driven quality systems and digitization, we’re differentiating ourselves and helping our customers to build resilient supply chains of their products into their markets in the future.
Yeah, interesting. So it prompts so many questions for me about this, Michael, but let’s just start with the market and your customers. I think about engineered wood products and I kind of make an assumption that a lot of this is coming from China today. I don’t know if that’s true or false. So how global is your business and what are the pressures that you guys are seeing given where we are from a geopolitical perspective and just our global economic perspective today.
So let me start with your China point. There are wood panels made everywhere. OSB and plywood and particle board and MDF and I can keep going, right? They’re made everywhere and they are imported. The nice thing about our chemicals is they’re made locally. They don’t travel very far. Their stability is shorter term compared to something that you can just put in a container and wait months or a year to use. So Hexion is a global organization. We have 25 plants all around the world for wood products. They’re in Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, North America.
We don’t play too much in Asia in the wood products area other than now through the acquisition of SmartTech. We have systems sales into those regions and then we have some manufacturing also in Europe for some of our coatings and emulsions and business in that space. So because of our made local philosophy, we’re not terribly impacted by the macro tariffs and the shifts that are occurring. We do have some exposure to cross border shipments into Canada, but that has become much more mild over time. And we hope it stays that way, of course. So the tariff risk has been minimized, but our sourcing strategy is still global. We still make sure we make the best choices for our products, for their quality and obviously to minimize any disruptions due to volatility in the market, we’re constantly growing our business partnerships globally.
We just partnered with a company called Kadant. Kadent is the world leader in what’s called strander technology. So basically when you take a tree and you cut it into the pieces that make OSB board, so the little pieces that get glued together to make a structural board, they’re the world leader in that. They’re based in Canada, and we look to that partnership to expand that capability into the markets that we play in as well. We also just announced this week a partnership with an early stage organization called Bloom Biorenewables. They are a technology leader in utilizing lignin. Lignin is a part of the tree that’s often used to burn because it doesn’t have too many uses.
So they use it for heating value and fuel value. And we’ve worked with them to build novel adhesives from the tree itself because lignin is the glue that holds the tree together. So we’re looking at international partnerships in technology to expand our innovation profile, to make sure we’re providing the best products to our customers and through our value chain.
Yeah, interesting. You started out saying how you’ve evolved to being more of a solutions provider or that’s a direction where you guys are going, but it sounds like you’re still innovating as well in products, in the services, and that becomes all, I guess, part of that solution.
You have to innovate both organically and inorganically. Hexion does not have the philosophy that’s often found in large organizations, that we call “not invented here.” If it’s not invented here, it can’t be worthwhile for your business. We believe that there are great innovations everywhere, and we want to be partnered with the best in what they do and provide our capabilities and our strengths to make them get to market faster or get to products sooner with the best and highest reliability possible.
Yeah, and I think we are in such a high period of innovation and transformation when you look across, not just the chemical industry, but across all industries. And so we’re seeing more and more companies partnering to get to sustainable products, partnering to bring in the right technologies to support their businesses, their customers, et cetera. So I think, as you say, you can’t afford just to be looking internally for the solutions. They’re everywhere around us.
It’s a global world, and in a global company you have to participate globally.
Right.
I’m very much a believer in diversity equals creativity. And what I mean by that is there are great ideas from people in so many different industries and so many different walks of life and so many different upbringings that creativity comes from everywhere. And we want to be able to leverage that creativity to deliver the best product and the best service that Hexion can give to everybody that we partner with going forward. So that’s really a goal of ours.
Yeah, makes sense. So let’s just talk a little bit about customers. You’ve already talked about this being kind of really the center of what you guys are doing. What are the biggest challenges that you maybe are hearing from your customers today as we sit here mid-2025? What are your customers saying? What are they asking for, and how are you responding?
Look, all customers in the market, all companies in the world are trying to do more with less.
They’re constantly being pushed for tighter costs, higher margins, changing labor positions in the market. Hexion wants to help provide innovations and products and solutions to solve those. So we work incredibly close with our customers and our partners, and they’re more partners than they are just customers. We look at ways of solving their problems as part of our offering and solution and through some of our AI powered systems that we’re now putting out into the market so our customers can operate their engineered production faster, safer at the highest quality, enabling every one of their operators to be the best operator.
Our AI systems allow everybody to perform at the highest level. So we have products like our SmartQuality product that we just launched at Ligna last month, the big wood engineering conference. This is a high performance, simple system, inexpensive, has an immediate return in months on the investment to drive higher product quality at lower cost and lower waste. So moving also to our sustainable solutions as well, that make sure that we’re helping our customers to be on a low carbon, renewable pathway with high performance. Our R&D systems as well are helping to challenge the sustainability around all components within the industry where we’re looking at renewable feedstocks, renewable sources, really original ways to provide adhesives and resins to the market that deliver outsized performance with a much, much lower carbon footprint. And that’s critical for what we do and how we innovate at Hexion.
Yeah, makes sense. So SmartQuality, which you guys have just recently rolled out, that’s targeting your customers’ manufacturing. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how it works, how do they even bring it in and make it effective?
SmartQuality is purposely built to be installed on the production line for all types of engineering wood panels. It gives operators real time feedback on the final product wood panel coming out the other side of their production. So if the product has deficiencies or defects in it, they learn it fast, they learn it quick. And we provide recommendations back to the operator how to improve their system upstream to make sure that they are making changes that lead to a much higher quality score. And not everybody’s wanting AI in their engineered systems. But our customers are looking for tighter specs, higher quality, better control, more efficient operation to allow their operators to do more in less time.
This solves that problem. This meets that demand with actionable insights for them to solve. And this system can be downloaded over the web, it’s got a small monthly fee, and it will deliver the highest returns of any product in the industry on a very simple, very capable install. Then this will be a lead up to our further product, which is called SmartPress. I know your question was on SmartQuality, but I can’t miss the opportunity to talk about our bigger product.
Absolutely.
Our bigger product is SmartPress, that automates the temperature and the pressure and the quality of the product as well, to build a foundation of an AI fully enabled system to the operator and to the producer of the wood panels. So we’re looking at becoming what we’re calling the ultimate operator. And the ultimate operator is allowing the operations team to work at the highest level so that every board they make is the best board they can and deliver to the customer. So SmartQuality is kind of a door opener, and SmartPress is changing the game.
Okay, so I’m going to be a little bit of a devil’s advocate here, Michael, I guess the question I have is really, how receptive are customers to this? Because I could see them saying, hey, Michael and Hexion team, that’s great, but we want you to provide adhesives. We’re not asking you to get into our actual operations and are you equipped to be part of our operations? How would you respond to that? Because it seems like you’re getting really intimately invested, not just in your products, but in the overall system.
I’ll tell you something that’s incredibly surprising. Hexion’s technical service team is badged to walk into a customer’s site. And most of our customers, we have that type of intimacy. They can go in and tell operators to make changes, and they will be listened to immediately. So we’re already doing this. We’re just doing it through a personal touch.
So our knowledge of how the system works and how it operates is above any one of our competitors. We are the best when it comes to this. And I will tell you, the information that is being built from the AI system allows us to engineer glue and resin at a much more customizable level.
We hear in the news about custom medicines that fit our DNA and fit our specific microbiome and things like that. Now, knowing the process and knowing the wood species and knowing the properties that come along with all of that, we can now develop resins that are singularly focused for the specific plant on the specific day of their operation. So think about that capability to enable what we are most known for, as you said, our resins, our glues. But now through AI and enablement on efficiency improvement for the customer and cost savings in the millions of dollars, we can also customize the glue that works better for them so they get even better products and better performance. So it’s really a full circle and the customers are demanding it. We have a wait list on installation of all of our systems.
How is the workforce responding? One of the questions that I think about especially as we start adopting more and more AI is having workforce readiness to actually utilize these tools. And frankly, it’s changing the way they work quite dramatically. They have to upskill differently than they do today. The manufacturing process is often thought of as being very manual, although we know there’s a ton of automation. But adding this additional layer of smart sophistication requires more upskilling of the workforce. Do you see this when you talk with your own workforce and your customer’s workforce?
So I could speak to Hexion and how we use AI. We make AI a requirement at Hexion. We think that every associate that we hire today must have some enablement or familiarity with AI. It’s just a must. It makes everybody so much more productive and so much more capable. I constantly groan every time I get an email if we’re talking about AI and somebody says, I wrote this email, I didn’t use AI.
And like there’s a stigma to using AI and I think that needs to go away very quickly because I think the stigma should be, why aren’t you using AI?
Right.
I would rather that email say, hey, I wrote this with AI to save myself 10 minutes and I was able to move on to another project that’s producing value for our customers and for our partners. Everything we do at the customer side for the enablement of AI, it’s allowing our partners to utilize their resources at a higher level.
Every operator is working at an equal level, whether they’ve been there for one year or 30 years.
So that really enables a level up of the playing field that’s never been seen before. We look at this as those people can now be used for other operations, other capabilities in the organization to make sure that they are running safely and smart throughout the entire way. So we look at AI as a pure enablement. And if you build it correctly with the right screens, the right recommendations, the right training embedded, upskilling is not a problem because it’s very intuitive, it’s very capable, and you can always say no to the recommendation if you feel that you know better and you know smarter. We don’t force the change. We allow the decision making to be made by those that feel they are the experts. But we believe that our systems are pretty right all the time.
Yeah, makes sense. The other piece on this is certainly we’ve all seen across not just the chemical industry, but many industries really, a talent gap and this concern about having enough of an available workforce. So to the degree that there is AI and other automation and digitization tools that help alleviate some of the human intervention needs or putting people into higher value work activities, it also addresses potentially some of this talent gap and just the sheer physical gap of number of people available to work.
Look, AI needs to be run through HR, not through IT. I’m a very big believer in that because it’s a skill set that just is an enablement.
With turnover of people, I don’t want to say people are any less loyal than they were. We have associates at Hexion that have been here 30, 40 years and their children are here and all of that. We love that generational capability. But AI is an enabling tool. It really does help solve some of those gaps that occur because the knowledge base allows it to accelerate so much faster. And with our transformational process as well, where we’re cross collaborative in everything we do, we don’t run anything in a silo. We make sure that we try and flatten the organization as much as possible and we put everybody in the room that could provide diverse thought so that you can challenge the status quo and make sure you’re making advancements in everything you do. And we think that’s the enablement to work in a function of how the world is moving today.
Yeah, that’s great. Well, and of course, Michael, throughout your career you’ve been an innovator, right? 100 patents, you’re clearly comfortable with adopting, embracing, and developing new things, which is really incredible.
Thank you for that.
Yeah. We’re kind of getting to the close of our time together and I love to ask this question. In fact, I hear from listeners that they love to hear the answers to these questions. So what advice would you give to a young professional just entering the industry that says, how do I make an impact? How do I achieve the success maybe that you’ve achieved? What advice do you offer people?
So, number one is you have to stay curious. You have to keep asking the question, how, why, what?
You can’t be afraid to ask the dumb question in a room. I asked some of the simplest questions because if I’m curious on something, I’m sure somebody else in the room is as well. That inquisitiveness is critical to being successful in any organization. If you don’t lean in and ask questions, challenges are going to persist and you’re not going to be able to really develop and transform an organization. Sometimes the simplest question, it’s not the question that’ll change something, but maybe how somebody answers that question will give somebody an idea on a problem that they’re working on that’s not being discussed today.
So it’s really about that empowerment of information and that spread of knowledge across the organization. And I’m a very big fan of being the dumbest person in the room. That is a goal that I have had my entire career. I surround myself with the smartest people I can. It makes my job really easy. So for me, if you can have, like I said, a diverse, capable, inquisitive, hungry team around you, that is the best place to be in the world.
Because your organization will constantly have that success. And it’s really about getting in a room together.
And always try and be present. When I was at Bell Labs years and years and years ago, Bell Labs is the place where the transistor was invented and C programming and Unix and wireless communications. It was an innovation Disneyland of sorts. And my first day, I was invited to lunch by a host, and he was a Nobel Prize winner. I was sat at this lunch of these preeminent scientists, Nobel Prize winners, Fields Medal winners, National Academy of Science, Medicine and Engineering. They were all diverse in education. And he came up to me in the middle of lunch and kind of whispered in my ear and said, what do you think the greatest invention to innovation is?
And this guy won a Nobel Prize in physics. So I was like, oh my God, I got to come up with something that he did. And I very quickly named something in spectroscopy that I thought would make me sound smart and him happy that it involved some of the stuff he worked in. And he goes, no, it’s the cafeteria. This was before interdisciplinary science, or as interdisciplinary as science has got. You had a mathematician talking to a biologist, a biologist talking to a chemist, a chemist talking to a physicist, a physicist talking to an engineer, and so on and so forth. That really was the key to the success of innovation. If you can keep asking questions and keep pushing experiences and learnings, the sky’s the limit.
That really, to me, would be the two things that I think are critical to becoming a success in whatever your endeavor to pursue.
Love it. Michael, this has been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed spending time with you today.
This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for this opportunity.
Thanks for joining me. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk with you again soon.
About Michael Lefenfeld:
Michael Lefenfeld
Michael Lefenfeld is President and Chief Executive Officer at Hexion Inc. He is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of Hexion Inc. and serves as a member of the Board of Managers for ASP Resins Holdings LP. Michael joined Hexion in January 2023.
Prior to joining Hexion and beginning in 2018, Michael served as President and CEO of Cyanco International, where he led the world’s largest manufacturer of gold and silver extraction materials, while driving the effort to make recovery safer and more efficient. From 2007 to 2017, he was President and CEO of SIGNa Chemistry, a global chemical manufacturer of reactive metal materials serving oil & gas recovery, petrochemical refining, alternative energy and chemical processing industries. Michael also founded Alkami Consulting Group, a technology investment advisory group, and Blood Gas Diagnostics, a medical device technology growth company.
With a unique combination of executive, operational and entrepreneurial experience, Michael holds more than 100 patents and patents pending that are intended to collectively address some of the world’s most pressing environmental and sustainable product-related challenges. A serial entrepreneur, he has been named a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum in 2016, while SIGNa was recognized with the EPA’s Presidential Green Chemistry Award under his leadership. Michael earned a Master of Philosophy and Master of Science in Chemistry from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis.