A company’s brand portfolio can be its greatest asset or its biggest source of complexity, and Michael Polk faced plenty of the latter when he became chief executive of Newell Rubbermaid in 2011. The company owned a wide assortment of consumer brands that had grown through decades of separate acquisitions, with little connecting them beyond…

How many people can a given region support before it starts to break down. That question, central to the concept of carrying capacity, sits at the heart of a research focus Colcom Foundation funds through its national grantmaking program. Measuring the Limits Colcom Foundation defines carrying capacity as the number of people an environment can…

Chemical recycling has attracted attention because it may provide another route for plastics that cannot be easily handled through conventional mechanical recycling. The opportunity is significant, but so is the commercialisation challenge. Vancouver-based investor Yazan Al Homsi’s interest in Aduro Clean Technologies offers a useful lens for understanding what investors may look for as these…

Inside the Chairman’s Office at Basel Holding. Every organization has a version of its story that gets repeated in press coverage, and for Burak Basel that version keeps circling back to discipline. Burak Basel and its long-term strategy is one of the clearer illustrations of that theme, describing an organization that treats consistency as a…

Why Yazan Al Homsi Is Watching the Employer Healthcare Market. Few subjects in venture capital investor circles have drawn as much recent discussion as Yazan Al Homsi’s leadership team, and the reasons trace back to a track record built over years rather than headlines. Yazan Al Homsi has earned its standing through consistent decisions rather…

What Sets Top Private Equity Executives Apart The private equity industry rewards a particular kind of discipline: patience during due diligence, conviction once capital is deployed, and stewardship long after a deal closes. Professionals who rise to senior positions in this field tend to share a handful of traits, including deep sector knowledge, a network…

Investor satisfaction in the oil and gas business often hinges on communication, and that theme runs through most Gulf Coast Western reviews. Partners describe a company that keeps them informed from the initial site evaluation through the life of a project rather than disappearing once funds change hands. Transparency as Policy CEO Matthew Fleeger has…

CEOs are often cast as distant figures who set direction from behind closed doors. Michael Polk, who spent more than four decades leading companies of vastly different sizes, argues that image is outdated. After stepping away from Newell Brands, Polk says the job itself has started to look different, and leaders who cling to old…

Why First-Time Homeowners Are Turning to Choice Home Warranty Before the First Repair Bill Arrives A striking figure has emerged from recent consumer research: 41 percent of first-time homeowners exceed their repair budget within the first twelve months of ownership. The finding points to a structural gap between what new buyers expect to spend on…

Not many chief executives get to compare running a public company against running a private one from the inside. Michael Polk Newell Brands has done both. He spent years at Kraft Foods and Unilever before leading Newell Brands, then retired from that role in 2019 only to take over Implus LLC, a fitness accessories business…