MEL #025 | From Plant Floors to Boardrooms through Business Acumen and Lifelong Learning with Mike Stone

STONE (00:00)

Great leaders are great learners. They study great leadership. They read. They ask questions.

They take notes and keep a journal. They test and challenge their own assumptions. They make mistakes and learn from them. So it’s a long iterative process.

ADAMS (00:42)

In this episode, I speak with Mike Stone, a retired chemical engineer whose career responsibilities progressed from production engineer to vice president with many stops along the way. Mike began his engineering path inspired by older cousins working in chemical engineering and driven by a desire to escape farm work. He earned his engineering degree from UT and built a diverse career spanning multiple chemical industries, eventually moving into business management and strategic planning.

Mike talks about how he was thrown into leadership early without formal training and how he initially struggled with managing people and navigating complex cultural dynamics. A pivotal moment came when he was sent to lead a newly acquired company under challenging circumstances without a proper handoff or leadership preparation. In our advice segment, Mike stresses the importance of gaining early exposure to leadership, business, and financial literacy. His core message is, engineers must invest in themselves continuously to gain separation from their peers and approach their careers with a CEO mindset. Mike provided a recommended reading list, which I will include in the show notes. Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Mike Stone.

ADAMS (01:48)

Hello, Mike. Welcome to the Mastering Engineering Leadership Podcast.

STONE (01:51)

Thanks for inviting me.

ADAMS (01:52)

Well, I’m thrilled to have you here. Can you start by telling us how you got into engineering as a career path?

STONE (01:58)

I was influenced by my twin cousins who were about 10 years older than me, who were Georgia tech engineers majoring in chemical engineering. And they were also co-op students at Union Carbides gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, Kentucky. And on certain weekends, their parents lived in Memphis. And so they would drive from Paducah to Memphis, but they also knew that if they timed it right, they could stop at our house at Union City

and get about the time my mother was putting the meal on the table and get a free meal. And so they talked about co-op experience and that, and I understand they can make money and that, and I had to make money to pay my way to school. So that’s, that’s how it happened. I couldn’t afford to go to Georgia Tech, but that’s, how it happened. And the other motivating factor was I did not want to go back and have to work on the farm. So.

ADAMS (02:42)

Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. That’s great motivation. Didn’t want to go back and work on the farm. So you needed something. You needed something that was going to be better than than working on the farm. Yep. So can you talk a little bit about your choice to go to UT and and you know what you chose to study and and and how things progress from there?

STONE (02:59)

Exactly.

Well, like I say, it was the most economic alternative I had. fortunately, I was good enough to get accepted. My math scores going through high school were pretty weak, but somehow someone turned me down, turned me around kind of late. And I ended up scoring pretty well on the math entrance exams part of it. it was a…

And of course, the other driving factor was getting on the co-op program, earn some money to pay my way through school. And of course, that was a great learning experience also. I wish every engineering student could participate in the co-op program. And we had really good professors and some of the things that I learned was in unit ops labs. In chemical engineering, we have what we call unit ops labs, and mainly in the senior year.

and particularly around instrumentation controls and things like that and in modeling, computer modeling. Believe it or not, we were doing that back in the early 60s. So that’s, it was a great experience.

ADAMS (04:06)

And then you finish school and you get into the workforce. Can you just talk a little bit about your career trajectory?

STONE (04:10)

Yeah, I started out in the nylon business in manufacturing and was within a year was promoted to unit supervisor of manufacturing of nylon molding polymers. And I think back on that, there I was had four shift form and reporting to me and I had no idea about managing people or leadership or anything along those lines.

So the point I would make to young people is that you need to start learning about leadership very early because you never know when you’re going to be promoted and put in a position where you have people reporting to you and you have an obligation to those people to be the best leader you can. And so you don’t want to have to start cramming on leadership after you’ve been promoted. You want to try to get ahead of it and learn as much as you can about leadership.

as early as you can. It won’t be wasted time, by any means. So, and then progression on my career. After that, I decided I wanted to do some and transfer to a small company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that made synthetic rubber. Moved up through process engineering to project management. And then my wife at the time decided she’d had enough of the heat and humidity of Baton Rouge.

ADAMS (05:01)

Right.

STONE (05:20)

I wanted to go to a nicer climate. Fortunately, I was able to get a job with Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical in Oakland, California, where the weather’s pretty nice. So we solved that problem and I worked for the Chemicals Division of Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical. the wonderful thing about that particular business is we were a very diverse, we were a little chemical conglomerate, I guess you could say. We were in a lot of different businesses.

And then we acquired a firm in Cleveland, Ohio called Harshall Chemical and combined that and they were very diversified. So we had an almost unmanageable collection of businesses that span from extreme specialty products to extreme commodities. And I was involved in that through business management, through strategic planning and it was my skill, my knowledge of business, which I learned through a two-year business correspondence course, as well as my knowledge and financial analysis skills that created promotional opportunities for me. And those would have never occurred had I not taken the steps to broaden my knowledge in those two areas. In the area of leadership, that’s where I didn’t have any particular advantage.

Because most young people probably don’t understand the history of leadership. when I was young, but through most of my career, it was generally accepted that leadership could not be taught or learned. In which it was something you were born with and you either had it or you didn’t have it. And then I would guess maybe 30 or 35 years ago, the academic departments of business school, psychology departments, neurology departments, all begin to tackle this thing of leadership and knowledge built on knowledge, built on knowledge. And thank goodness these people took this on. So today it’s generally recognized and accepted that leadership can be taught and learned. And so it’s a whole different situation for young people today. They have every opportunity to learn a lot about leadership, whereas

That knowledge was just not available for large portion.

ADAMS (07:27)

Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I’m really glad that that myth has been dispelled pretty soundly, I think, with all of the real rigor behind studying leadership and identifying the skills and traits, et cetera. So I agree with you that I’m really glad that that myth has been dispelled. And that then now means that

There’s no reason not to start learning about it. Say it more to the point. There’s no excuse. So I do want to go back to, you’ve talked about, started more in sort of kind of pure engineering, if I would call it that, but then you got into project management, strategic planning, and, you know, more the business side of things. And you decided to continue to educate yourself.

in those other areas, because you saw those as maybe promotion opportunities. Can you just talk a little bit about your approach to identifying maybe skills you need to learn and then deciding to go after it?

STONE (08:24)

Yeah, it was, I was pretty lucky. I think this happened soon after I became a parent. You know, when you become a parent, life becomes a lot more serious. And one day I had the intestinal fortitude to ask my boss’s boss, I caught him in the hall. And I guess I asked him, know, what, Mr. Groves, what do I need to do to get ahead in the business world? And he said,

Mike, if you want to get ahead in the business world, you’ve got to be on chapter two while everyone else is on chapter one. And he says, now I’ve got to go to a meeting. I don’t have time to talk. And I never had the courage to go back to him and say, well, Mr. Gross, what’s the title of this book? He’s basically saying I need to be ahead of my peers in acquiring knowledge, but he didn’t tell me what area of knowledge. And fortunately, I ran across an advertisement for an online firm for a business correspondent, two-year business correspondence course. And I signed up and I’m sure his one sentence piece of advice was stuck in my mind. So I took action on it. And that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life. My career would not turned out nearly as well as it had if I had not made it. Now it was a commitment. It was 24 courses. Every morning I’d get up and study for about an hour and a half.

And then on the weekend, I had to put in another three or four hours working on assignments, reading, reading the assignments, turning in an assignment, getting a grade on it. And this went on for two years. But and the company where I took it, Alexander Hamilton Institute, no one knew about, you no one gave a hoot about Alex. All they knew was that I knew more about business than most of my peers. They could see it.

And then the other aspect of it was when I learned about engineering economics preparing for a professional engineering exam. And that financial knowledge skills also helped separate me from other peers. And it was a combination of those two areas of knowledge. And that within about a three year period, there’s about a three year period lag between acquiring that knowledge and seeing the results of it in form of promotions.

But it happened and it was only after I retired tired and looked back on my career that I realized the strong connection between what I did and my success. And I know that I would not be in as good a place as I am today had I not done that. And so this all amounts to just continuing to invest in yourself. Lauren Buffett says the best investment a young person can make is to invest in yourself.

And that’s true because the sooner you do it, the more time you have to get the benefits of that.

ADAMS (10:56)

Yes, absolutely. And there’s a nuance to what you said about your own story that I want to talk a little bit more about. And that is you took the courses. And as you said, nobody cared about the Institute or whatever you went through. But they cared about you were obviously demonstrating something. Once you had that knowledge, you then converted that into some sort of action that allowed your you know, the bosses and the people around you to recognize, okay, he’s different. He is above his peers and therefore, you know, the benefits of promotion. Can you a little bit about what you did there?

STONE (11:32)

Detail on that. When I went to work for Kaiser chemicals in Oakland, I was very fortunate to my supervisor who was director of the corporate engineering group was a chemical engineering graduate from Cornell. And he was probably one of the best bosses I ever had. And then later in life, I learned that he he was kind of behind a lot of my promotions that came along. So he’s the one he’s the primary one that saw in me these these things I’m talking about.

And he once told me that when he went to Cornell, engineering, you know, it was a five-year curriculum. And most of the fifth year was related to business analysis and business economics. He said, were even, one time we were assigned a problem and the problem was what, provide an estimate of the return on investment for the fifth year of study at Cornell.

So I asked him, and I said, Phil, did you get an MBA somewhere? You know a lot about business and financial analysis. And he told me that story about the fifth year at Cornell. He did not get an MBA, but they taught him a lot of the important aspects in that fifth year at Cornell. And so he recognized that I could talk about inventory management. I could talk about working capital management, capital

intensity of businesses. And it was, you he recognized that and then he, he set me up for moving into corporate development, looking for acquisition candidates for the chemicals division. And then also getting involved in strategic planning for all the diversified businesses of Kaiser and Women in Chemical. And then from there, I was promoted to a business manager. The chemicals division was run by four business managers and I was one of those four business managers. And so I can’t tell you specifically anything, but it’s just, you know, people pick up that someone has a broader sense of business, business strategy, and then most other engineers. And you don’t have to go out of your way to say, look how smart I am.

It just comes out naturally in conversations and discussions about business situations. And one of the things I was assigned to do in corporate development was review all of the requests for investments that came in from the various divisions prior to sending that request to the division president. I was kind of the final checkpoint because they knew that I could look behind the numbers and ask the hard questions to make sure that

people were not fudging or playing games. So I know it’s hard for a young person to comprehend what I’m saying, but when you gain that knowledge, it will show one way the other sooner or later. Now don’t expect instant gratification. It may take two or three years for this to evolve and develop. the other thing is that it’ll make you a better investment investor of your own personal assets too.

ADAMS (14:28)

Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah, you mentioned something that this is what I’m teaching my students. As you know, I’m teaching a new engineering leadership course. And one of the things that I’m suggesting to my students is like, you’re still an undergrad. No one’s expecting you to have all these right answers. I said, one way that you can signal to leaders that you are leadership material is if you ask questions.

that are a little bit more strategic. If you ask about how does this impact the business side of things, what are some of the benchmarks we’re using to consider this, things like that, that lets them know, this person’s thinking a little bit more broadly. Exactly, and so I think that you are, you said that in a similar way, just in terms of people can pick up on it in the conversations and things like that, and so.

What I’m teaching my students, I’ll give them several lessons and then occasionally I’ll be like, okay, this is how to be seen as a leader. This is how you take what I, even if you can’t apply the actual like leadership piece of it now, this is how you can signal that you’re inclined in that direction.

STONE (15:29)

A way that I’ve expressed the same thing to students is to say, develop a think like an owner mindset. Think like an owner. In other words, if you owned all or part of the business that you’re involved with, what would you be doing? You’d be looking for ways to make the business more profitable. You’d have your eyes and ears open and you’d be, just like you say, you’d be asking questions to help you formulate where are the best opportunities to improve the business operations, to reduce waste, improve quality, improve production rate, all the things that good engineers do. Some engineers just, they just take whatever they’re assigned and work on it. And they never develop this think like an owner mindset. And if you can do that, the things you’re talking about will come out naturally.

ADAMS (16:14)

Yeah, that’s a great point. Maybe one last question before we leave on your career trajectory. You you talk about your progression. Was there anything in terms of leadership skills or the way you thought about leadership that also evolved as you continue to think about more broadly about the business and more about this owner mindset?

STONE (16:34)

Yeah, well, unfortunately, as I say, leadership just didn’t come up too much. And the closest thing I had to leadership development was I was one of a group of about six or seven people that were selected to go to a week long offsite development type of thing that was run by

a couple of guys in the human resources department. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect, I think they wanted to take a close look at future potential leaders. And the way they did this is, and this has to do a little bit with emotional intelligence. They wanted, there were two of them that were conducting the seminar, and they wanted to create a stressful situation.

and see how we would respond to it. And what they did is they would outline a scenario or a situation, and then they would say, okay, we’re the local TV station that’s coming in. You’re the plant manager. You just dumped a lot of chemicals in the river and who knows how much damage your plant has done. they’re there with a camera stuck in front of your face. A guy’s got a microphone in front of you and he’s asking you some really tough questions.

and they want to see how you respond to that situation. and they would play these videos back on a TV screen. You and the whole class would look at it and laugh at you and everything.

But that was one of the things they did to help. I think they were looking to see who has the potential here. But it also taught you how to try to stay cool, calm, and collected in a stressful situation.

ADAMS (17:57)

Wow.

STONE (18:13)

Which is an important characteristic of emotional intelligence.

ADAMS (18:27)

Okay, Mike, can you give me an example of when you had to use leadership skills?

STONE (18:32)

I can give an example of where I wish I had better leadership skills at the time. That’s great. It’s kind of a convoluted back door way to answering the question. We acquired a company in Los Angeles and I was sent down to head up sales and marketing and it was a company that made

catalyst for the petroleum industry. And I was to train with the president who was going to be retiring at about six months. So I was going to have six months of training under him. And the evening before I was to show up the next day, I got a call from them saying I just went to the doctor today and they want to do more tests tomorrow. So I won’t be able to come in tomorrow. You just go on in and introduce yourself.

go into my office and get settled in and I’ll see you in a day or two. Well, he was diagnosed with brain, a two brain tumor and he never came back again. So I never had the benefit of the six months of training that I had hoped to get under him. It was a situation where a previous employer of Kaiser Aluminum who had been fired because of his

He just didn’t fit in with our group from a culture standpoint. He was one of the people in this group that was in the leadership position. he was not an example of our culture by any means. And yet all the people in the office where I went to assumed that he was and that I would be a carbon copy of what they saw in him.

My boss said he’s the only person you ever had to fire twice. So as soon as we acquired the company, he fired this guy the second. So here I was without any real leadership training in a culture. It was it was just a difficult situation. And I look back on that. And based on what I’ve learned about leadership in the last 10 or 15 years.

ADAMS (20:11)

Okay.

STONE (20:26)

I see so many ways that I could have dealt with and handle that situation better. And it makes me think that how important it is for young people today to really get up to speed on leadership, because you never know when you’re going to be thrown into a difficult situation. That requires all your leadership skills plus a little bit.

And it’s critical, it’s critical to how things evolve and develop. But if I were to grade myself through most of my career, leadership was not one of my strengths. I would give myself a C or a C minus. The other thing I would add about leadership, often leaders have an impact, yet they have no idea of the impact they’re having. For instance, when my boss is boss,

gave me that one sentence advice beyond chapter two, everyone else was chapter one. He never realized the impact that had on me and my future and potentially the impact that I might have on other engineering students through the things I’m doing at the University of Tennessee. If someone asked him to what are some of the leadership impacts that he had, this would have never come up on his radar screen.

I was going to several years ago, I was going to call him and thank him for that advice. When I was trying to track him down, first thing that came up was his obituary. So he had passed away a couple of years before that. So he never knew the impact that one sentence had. And I would say that’s true for a lot of leadership. A lot of many times leaders don’t realize the impact that they have because it just doesn’t come up on the radar screen. Now there are bigger things like

big strategic decisions about acquisitions, divestitures that happen at the highest levels in an organization. Those are key to strategic decision. This is I call strategic leadership. And often leaders will respond to something they’ve done along those lines that they think is material and important. Jack Welch had a quote. He said that

Before you look, let’s see. Let me see if I can find it here.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. So he put a lot of emphasis on developing people and he expected all of his leaders to do the same thing.

ADAMS (22:40)

Yeah, I agree with you in particular about your comment about leaders not realizing the impact they have. the way I describe it is the power of the role that you have comes with a megaphone of good and bad.

So you pass a kind word, you give encouragement, and people really take that as something, and good advice, something that, just like you said, that one line of some advice, and you took that to heart, because this is a leader saying that. Same, true, for when you’re having a bad day, something happened at home, and you carry that with you into a meeting, and you cut somebody off, that also is magnified

STONE (23:19)

One of the worst things you can do is walk around with a frown on his face. A smile on the face is the opposite. I’ll give you an example. Dean Mench seems to always have a smile on his face. And you know, you know, he’s dealing with you have no idea the complexities that he’s dealing with every day. They would put a frown on your face and my face pretty seriously, but he doesn’t let it show.

ADAMS (23:22)

Yes, absolutely.

STONE (23:42)

Instead, he shows the positive, open, you know, with big smile on his face. that’s that’s leaders have to be conscious of people watch and listen to everything you do and every motion you make. And and and it’s it’s all this is, you know, body language stuff. But there’s a there’s a lot of there’s a lot of parts and pieces to leadership. And it’s

Let me just share a quote that I ran across that I think I really like. This was in an article in the Leader to Leader magazine several years ago. The author is Anthony Bell. And in that article, he said, no one becomes a great leader by chance. Great leaders are great learners. They study great leadership. They read. They ask questions.

They take notes and keep a journal. They test and challenge their own assumptions. They make mistakes and learn from them. So it’s a long iterative process. It’s not, you don’t become a leader instantly overnight, but every step you take along this long journey puts you ahead of other engineers that are your peers who are doing zero in terms of developing their leadership knowledge. And all of that

accumulates and builds up over time. And it’s not a wasted effort by any means. So don’t be discouraged by the journey, but just in fact, being excited about the journey.

ADAMS (25:08)

I agree.

All right, Mike, what advice do you have for engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership roles?

STONE (25:23)

Well, in less than two hours. I think there’s three main areas of knowledge that young engineering graduates need to start going after as soon as they can after they graduate. One is develop business knowledge.

The best way to do that, if you can, is get an MBA. You look at most engineers who are very successful, you’ll see an MBA back there somewhere along the line. The second is to become as financially astute. And that means understanding economics, accounting, and then financial analysis skills, what’s taught in engineering economics.

or in the business school, finance or stuff like that. These are ways that you can separate yourself from the pack. And that’s what it’s all about is gaining separation early. So many young graduates think, well, I’ll learn on the job. And you will learn on the job. You learn a lot on the job, but your peers are also learning on the job. And so how do you separate yourself from your peers? And both of you are learning on the job and advancing.

And so you do it through self study. And however you choose to do that, whether you’re watching videos, whether you’re reading books, whether you’re listening to podcasts, whether you’re listening to audio books, take it upon yourself. But one of the things I emphasize is that when you get that engineering degree, your career is a business and you are the CEO of that business.

So everyone wants to be a CEO. Well, here you are. You can be a CEO right from the get go. How well do you manage that career? How well do you manage your finances? How much money do you save? How do you invest that money? Take on this responsibility of managing your business and think like a CEO. And these are the ways that you can separate yourself.

from your peers and management notices. Another important area is presentation skills, speaking in public, being very professional about when you have an opportunity to make a technical presentation. There’s a book in that reading list that I think is called the Articulate Executive, which talks about that particular.

These are the ways that you extend the gap between yourself and your peers, and it takes a little extra effort. But that extra effort pays off big time, because your peers are sitting on their hands not doing anything. So it makes it easy for you to make to separate that get that gap separation. If everyone were spending one hour a day reading books and advancing their knowledge, then you’d have to spend two or three hours a day to separate yourself. But fortunately for you, 99 % of the engineers are not doing anything. They think they’ve got it made. And they’re not doing anything to separate themselves from the past.

Let me just briefly touch on two or three building blocks, leadership building blocks. And we’ll go into too much detail, but the people skills. That means learning a little bit about psychology. Books that I recommend there would be Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Brad Bradbury. Another book that’s been around for years is How to Win Friends and Influence People.

by Dale Carnegie. Be sure to get the most recent edition of that book. Another area is conversation skills, able to having a knowing how to have an impactful conversation one-on-one with other people. A book I recommend there is called Conversationally Speaking by Alan Garner. One of the things I remember there he said: 

When we communicate, we communicate in three ways. It’s the words we say, our tone of voice, and our body language. And often our tone of voice and body language communicates more than the words we say. Another area is to develop public speaking skills. And the best way I know to do that is to join the local Toastmasters International Club. It’s excellent.

Another area of knowledge is being able to read body language, reading other people’s body language and being able to use your body language as part of your communications package. And a book I recommend there is what called What Everybody is Saying by Navarro. He was a former FBI interrogator. And so obviously they did reading body language as a big part of their interrogation process.

Other general things in terms of attitude, be a team player. Develop a positive can-do attitude. Be a volunteer. When your boss asks for someone to volunteer, stick your hand up. Misty Mays tells a great story about how an intern she had working for her, volunteered when no one else would.

And she was so impressed that after the meeting, she made him a job offer to come to work for her after he graduated. Be a professional. The book I recommend there is The Power of Professionalism by Bill Wiersner. The author was a mechanical engineer. He didn’t spend all of his career studying psychology in the university.

went out into the real world and then he decided to start writing books. One of the things I remember in there, he talks about the seven mindsets of a professional. And he says that not everyone can be a leader, but everyone can be a professional. And he said, leaders that are not professionals, professional will not be a leader very long. So you can say that developing a professionalism is a precursor to becoming a leader. And all of this stuff makes, it’s how we conduct ourselves among others. And it’s just, I think a great summary of some really important points. When it comes to leadership books in particular, I like a book called The Truth About Leadership.

by Kouzes and Posner. You probably know the authors or heard on them. They spent their entire career teaching, researching and writing books about leadership. And this is one of their most recent editions. Another book I like is How Successful People Lead by John C. Maxwell. It’s a small book, but it teaches you the five different levels as you go up in an organization and how your leadership

skills requirements change from level to level and you need to be preparing for that next level. So that and I think it just to me it makes no sense for a young engineer right out of college to be thinking about strategic by leadership at the executive level. You need to be learning about leadership at your level and then keep progressing with time.

You’ll never get to that top level if you don’t learn about leadership at your level and the next level. those are some of, and the other thing I’d recommend is reading biographies or autobiographies written by well-known leaders, especially engineers who become leaders like Jack Welch, Andy Grove with Intel.

There’s a lot of parts and pieces to leadership.

ADAMS (32:08)

Absolutely.

Mike, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us.

STONE (32:12)

My pleasure.