CEO Corner: David Sewell On Managing Change and Defining Success Beyond Early Wins
It’s one thing to walk into an organization as the new CEO, bringing with you goals, priorities and ideas about things you’re looking to upgrade or change more broadly. It’s another thing altogether when the organization you’re walking into is preparing for a massive strategic change.
That was David Sewell a year ago. A veteran of Sherwin-Williams and General Electric who had most recently been president and CEO of packaging company WestRock, Sewell joined Honeywell International in March of 2025 as the CEO of its roughly $4 billion advanced materials group. That business was months away from being spun out as Solstice Advanced Materials — the first major milestone in Honeywell’s plan to split into three companies — meaning Sewell’s already-full plate had a hefty helping of culture and communication added to it.
Sewell sat down recently with Geert De Lombaerde to discuss strategy, leadership, investment plans and company culture. In the first part of their conversation, which was published recently at IndustryWeek, Sewell discussed his work telling Solstice’s stand-alone story as well as how he and his team are thinking about allocating capital between organic growth and possible acquisitions.
In the lightly edited comments below, Sewell digs deeper into how he’s looking to refine Solstice’s culture, measure success and drive innovation in both the short and long term.
De Lombaerde: You’ve talked about really spending a lot of time and being intentional about Solstice’s culture. In a way, you want to change the tone a little bit to emphasize the opportunities that are out there. How have you gone about communicating that?
Sewell: When we started, we said, “Let’s take the best of Honeywell. It’s this amazing organization, but we are truly a specialty chemical and materials company, and our scale is going to be different. So what is it that we want to take from Honeywell and make sure we keep as a new company? And then what is it that we want to do as a truly customer-focused organization in this space that allows us to differentiate and be successful?”
And so we talked to hundreds of employees. We talked to customers. We did a lot of benchmarking, and we built this from the ground up. We rolled this out at the beginning of the year, and it’s been incredibly well-received. At a high level, it’s more entrepreneurship to provide more speed and decision-making, a higher degree of accountability for that entrepreneurship, a higher degree of customer focus and an ownership mentality that allows us to be a nimble organization. Because we are at the inflection point of these growth sectors, we have to respond faster.
De Lombaerde: That reminds me a little bit about 3M and Bill Brown, who has, since he’s been there, talked a lot about that nimbleness and that little bit of extra — my word, not his — aggression, a little bit of bite. He has talked about, “Let’s get back to what people thought of as 3M back in the day.” It sounds like you’re trying to inject a little bit more urgency as well.
We’re going to be nimble. We have a little bit more entrepreneurship but we have a higher degree of accountability. So we’re tying that in and we’re doing what we say we’re going to do.
Sewell: Exactly. I think the backbone of our business has been innovation, and it’s not just a word. We have over 5,700 patents, which is really remarkable for a company of our scale. And another investment we’ve made is in R&D because we know that innovation is why customers come to us. They come to us for co-innovation, to help them solve these difficult challenges.
And so we’ve increased our spend in R&D and innovation. We’ve put a new process together for innovation. And so now [our people] are saying, “Boy, this is being an innovative company.”
We’re going to be nimble. We have a little bit more entrepreneurship, but we have a higher degree of accountability. So we’re tying that in, and we’re doing what we say we’re going to do.
De Lombaerde: Can you talk a little more about that new process for innovation? What does that look like on the ground? There’s more capital being put to work. What are you looking for from that capital?
Sewell: So we’ve kind of re-evaluated our stage-gate process. We’ve said, “Which are the ones where we need to be going to market faster? What are the long-term ones and the molecules that we really need to be developing? And what are the true breakthrough technologies?”
We wanted to get away a little bit from ensuring we’re just working on the short term. We’re balancing the long term, and so we’ve redeployed resources that way to ensure we’re delivering short-term innovation, but not at the sacrifice of these next-generation molecules like the next-generation HFO molecule. Let’s make sure we have a team that’s delivering on that but also has a sense of accountability. (Editor's note: HFOs are hydrofluoroolefins, compounds containing carbon, fluorine and hydrogen that make for more environmentally friendly refrigerants than products commonly used in the recent decade.)
And then we’ve asked how we use AI to differentiate our R&D development process. Now, we’re starting to introduce that to help us be even more effective. We know this is a longer-term molecule that’s very complicated, and with the history we have, how do we leverage that research and use AI to accelerate the probability of those next-generation molecules? It’s really exciting to see what that team is accomplishing.
De Lombaerde: In terms of leading the Solstice organization through the spin, it struck me that the last thing you did at WestRock was help oversee a merger and the combining of the organization [with Smurfit Kappa]. Have you been able to take anything from doing the reverse here? Are there any learnings that you could take from the process from a couple of years ago to what you’ve been doing here?
Sewell: Well, I think the way that we went into that merger and the way we look at this is, “Don’t get stuck in the old ways of which we’ve always done things. The only thing we need to be married to is success.” So if Honeywell had a great way to do it, it doesn’t mean we need to reinvent it. But if there’s a better way to do it, let’s all rally behind that.
And let’s just worry about success and what’s best for the customer, what’s best for our employees, versus saying, “Let’s do it this way or let’s do it that way.” Let’s just be more open-minded to, “What’s the best way to do it?” as opposed to just getting into that mindset [of] it’s either got to be the old way or this way.
It could be a completely new way and and opening up people’s minds to change and change management is really important.
De Lombaerde: I would think it helps in that respect that you’re still “the new guy” to some extent, right?
Sewell: Yeah, exactly.
De Lombaerde: How do you keep that change management energy in an organization? What are you paying attention to — or what do you think you might be paying attention to in a year or two — to keep that momentum in the organization?
Sewell: That’s a really good question because we’ve talked about how do we measure our success, that we’re doing this the right way. And a couple of things that we are really looking at firmly from an employee standpoint [are]:
- Retention. Do we have better retention rates than we have ever had? Because we want to not only attract great talent, but keep great talent. So that’s a big aspect of ensuring we’re a great place to work.
- Are we accelerating innovation even better and faster than we had before? How are our co-development projects and co-innovation projects with our customers commercializing? And are we seeing those new product introductions into the market? That’s a huge piece of it.
- And then it’s customer growth. We really want to focus on the customer, and our philosophy moving forward is we’re going to do everything to make sure our customers are successful. Then our success will just align with that, versus looking at our success and not keeping that focus on the customer.
So those are some of the elements that are really important to us that we’re going to be measuring moving forward.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Contributor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde joined EndeavorB2B in September 2021 to cover public companies, markets, and economic trends primarily for IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal, T&D World, and Healthcare Innovation. His work focuses on strategy, leadership, capital spending, and mergers and acquisitions, and he also works with Endeavor Business Intelligence on surveys and data projects.
Geert has been in business journalism since the mid-1990s. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati, initially covering retail and the courts before shifting to banking, insurance, and investing. He later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal before being named editor of the Nashville Post in 2008. He led a team that helped grow the Post's online traffic by an average of more than 15% annually before joining Endeavor.
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