Zenith Search Partners

10/20/2026

At 5:00 PM yesterday, I looked at my desk and realized I had answered 42 emails, attended four meetings, resolved two minor emergencies, and accomplished absolutely zero percent of what I actually planned to do when I opened my laptop at 8:00 AM.

If busyness were an Olympic sport, I would have been standing on the podium holding a medal. But if actual progress were the metric, I was still sitting in the locker room putting my shoes on.

We have all had those days where we trade meaningful output for tactical activity. You spend eight hours reacting, putting out fires, and replying to messages that feel urgent, only to shut your computer down at the end of the day feeling completely exhausted and oddly unfulfilled.

The trap for leaders is that busyness feels like productivity while it is happening. Your brain gets a quick hit of satisfaction every time you clear an email or check off a minor task, even if none of those tasks actually move your business, your team, or your strategic goals forward. It is easy to confuse motion with progress.

Real leadership requires a deliberate pause. It means having the discipline to let non-urgent messages sit in your inbox for a couple of hours so you can protect the quiet, high-value work that actually moves the needle.

At the end of a long day, the most important evaluation isn't "How many things did I reply to?" It is "Did I do anything today that will actually matter six months from now?"

How do you protect your calendar when the day threatens to drag you into pure reactive mode?

10/15/2026

Every October, my LinkedIn feed gets flooded with panicked posts reminding us that there are only ninety days left in the year. The tone is usually somewhere between an aggressive pep talk and a subtle existential threat. Everyone seems to be shouting about finishing strong and closing the gap.

I like to look at October a little differently. Ninety days is actually a tremendous amount of time. Instead of stressing over what you haven't finished yet, flip the perspective. What could you start right now that would put you in a materially better position on January 1?

A critical executive search usually takes time to get right. Building a relationship with a key supplier doesn't happen overnight. Fixing a broken team dynamic or starting a new operational habit takes consistent effort. If you wait until January to launch those initiatives, you are already behind before the year even starts.

October is not just the home stretch of the current year. It is the launchpad for the next one.

10/13/2026

"The products that make other products possible."

I came across that description of specialty chemicals in a recent interview with SOCMA President Jenn Klein, and it stopped me in my tracks because of how accurately it captures this industry. Most people outside our world will never know the exact chemical compounds sitting inside a semiconductor, an aircraft wing, a pharmaceutical batch, or a complex water treatment system. They just know the phone powers up, the plane lands safely, and the medicine does its job.

Having spent decades around this sector, that quiet, invisible impact is still what I find most fascinating about the work. In a business world obsessed with flashy consumer brands and headline-grabbing tech apps, some of the most critical and resilient companies on earth are operating two or three steps behind the stuff everybody else sees. They are the structural foundation holding up modern life.

It is no surprise to me that a recent midyear industry poll showed over 41 percent of specialty chemical executives anticipating strong growth ahead. Even amid persistent supply chain headaches, when your products are what make everything else possible, your work is always essential.

To my friends in specialty chemistry and technical manufacturing: do you still try to explain what you actually do at family dinners, or have you completely given up and settled on "I make stuff"?

Link to article: https://www.soci.org/news/2026/9/specialty-chemicals-sector-sees-growth-ahead?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Jenn Klein is the president and CEO of SOCMA, the Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates which has more than 150 member companies – who have operations across 243 sites - throughout the specialty chemical supply chain in North America. C&I spoke to her about the outlook for specialty chemi...

10/08/2026

Lowest cost matters right up until the moment the exact product you need isn't on the truck.

For years, supply chain conversations were almost entirely about efficiency. How lean can we make inventory? How low can we drive the price per pound?

Now, reliability is having a very well-deserved moment.

An insightful ICIS report published this week (link in comments...) pointed out that European chemical distributors are seeing stronger sales and margins, even in markets where downstream demand remains fairly flat.

The reason isn't a sudden boom in chemical consumption. It is because customers dealing with unpredictable supply chains are putting a massive premium on security of supply, local inventory, fast response times, and real technical support.

What struck me about the piece wasn't really the financial story. It was the reminder of what actually holds this industry together.

Technical knowledge, responsiveness, and genuine relationships are nearly impossible to quantify on a spreadsheet when everything is running smoothly.

They become extraordinarily easy to value the second things go sideways.

Are you seeing your buyers shift their focus from pure price negotiations toward long-term reliability this quarter?

10/06/2026

I am a big fan of modern technology. I love automated workflows, candidate databases, and digital tools that make business faster and cleaner. But I am also a massive fan of a wildly unappreciated piece of legacy technology: picking up the phone.

I see this happen all the time in executive search and corporate operations. A relatively simple question comes up about a candidate's timeline or a project scope. Instead of addressing it directly, it triggers an email chain. Eight replies later, six people are copied, three people are confused, and someone suggests scheduling a thirty minute meeting two weeks from now to align on the thread.

What could have been resolved in a quick, human conversation has now consumed three weeks of calendar inertia.

So much of what bogs down progress in business is not a lack of strategy or tools. It is just a hesitation to talk directly to another human being. A 15-minute phone call between two people who actually have the authority to make a decision can save weeks of digital ping-pong.

What is one email chain sitting in your inbox right now that could be completely solved with a five-minute phone call? Give me a call. Let's talk about it!

10/02/2026

I look at the jobs report every month, but I try to remind myself that every number in it represents a person and a business making a decision.

September added 29,000 jobs, while unemployment remained relatively steady at 4.2%. August’s stronger number was also revised down from 162,000 to 133,000.

So, no, this isn’t exactly a report that makes you want to break out the confetti.

But I did find something encouraging: Manufacturing added another 9,000 jobs in September and is now up 72,000 since December.

Having spent a good part of my career in and around industrial markets, I know those numbers represent a lot more than positions on a spreadsheet. They represent companies investing, people getting opportunities, and businesses deciding there’s enough confidence in what comes next to add someone to the team.

The overall labor market may be moving slowly, but different industries continue to tell very different stories.

And those are the stories I’m usually most interested in.

What are you seeing in your corner of the market?

Here's an article to check out:

U.S. employers added 29,000 jobs in September as the unemployment rate inched up to 4.2%. Job gains for July and August were revised down by a total of 60,000 jobs, extending a lackluster run for the job market.

10/01/2026

After spending decades around chemical distribution and executive recruiting, you start to develop a certain rhythm. You begin to recognize the exact moment a leadership transition is about to go sideways, or the subtle warning signs that a company culture is fracturing. But there is a massive difference between having experience and thinking you have a crystal ball.

Experience does not mean you know every answer before the question is even asked. It simply gives you pattern recognition. It means when a complex situation lands on your desk, you do not panic, because you have seen a version of this movie before. You recognize the themes, the risks, and the common failure points.

The danger comes when experience turns into arrogance. The moment you assume a new situation is identical to one you handled five years ago, you stop listening. True pattern recognition should actually make you more humble, not less. It gives you better questions to ask, not a magic wand to wave.

How has your industry experience changed the way you approach problem-solving over the years? Has it made you more certain, or more curious?

09/29/2026

When most people think about artificial intelligence, they picture algorithms, microchips, or maybe a slight fear of chatbots taking over the world.

When I think about AI, I end up thinking about water treatment.

Data centers generate an astonishing amount of heat. Keeping those servers cool requires massive scale, precise water chemistry, coolants, continuous monitoring, and absolute system reliability. Behind every futuristic cloud network is a very grounded team of water treaters making sure the whole thing doesn’t overheat.

I came across a piece in Water Technology recently (link in comments...) about ChemTreat expanding its work with Dow in Ohio to support data center infrastructure. The stat that really jumped out at me was that ChemTreat already services more than 200 data center sites.

That is more than just an impressive business milestone. It highlights a fundamental truth about specialized industrial fields.

Sometimes groundbreaking new technology does not replace old school expertise.

It simply creates brand new, high-stakes arenas where that expertise is essential.

If you spend your days worrying about cooling towers, chemical dosing, and corrosion control, you aren't just maintaining legacy infrastructure anymore. You are literally keeping the AI revolution running.

Are you seeing your client base or workload shift toward data center cooling in your corner of the industry?

09/17/2026

Everyone is talking about the domestic microchip boom, but almost no one is talking about the water.

We hear endless news about new semiconductor fabs and battery gigafactories breaking ground across the country. But behind every pristine cleanroom is an ultra-pure water (UPW) treatment plant working behind the scenes.

Treating water to UPW standards means removing virtually every single contaminant down to the molecular level. If the chemical treatment or filtration balance is off by even a fraction, a multimillion dollar batch of microchips gets scrapped.

As these mega-facilities come online, the bottleneck isn't just silicon or equipment. It is the specialized water infrastructure and the technical talent required to run it.

In industrial water treatment, the companies winning these massive contracts are not just selling chemicals and hardware. They are selling absolute risk mitigation to facilities where zero downtime is the only acceptable metric.

It takes a very specific kind of technical leader to navigate that level of pressure.

If you operate in the high-purity water space, are you feeling the talent squeeze yet, or are you managing to stay ahead of the curve?

09/15/2026

I am a massive fan of Angela Duckworth’s book, GRIT. But I have a bone to pick with how the business world has hijacked the word.

I hear leaders throw the term around constantly. "We just need our team to show a little more grit." Usually, this is corporate code for: "I need everyone to work 70 hours this week to fix a totally broken process."

I sold in the chemical industry for years. I know exactly what a grind looks like. Managing a sudden propylene glycol shortage or dealing with logistical nightmares is not exactly a glamorous, front page startup story. It requires a ridiculous amount of stamina.

But as leaders, we often confuse true grit with blind stubbornness.

Grit is passion and perseverance for a long term goal. Stubbornness is banging your head against a brick wall and expecting the wall to move.

If you are constantly asking your team to just "grit their teeth" and power through a bad strategy or a terrible supply chain setup, you are not building a resilient culture. You are just engineering burnout.

True leadership grit is keeping your team connected to the big picture when the day to day work feels like wading through wet cement. It is celebrating the boring, completely unsexy wins. Most importantly, it is knowing when to pivot the strategy so your team's hard work actually yields a result.

Take a look at your team this week. Are they showing true grit, or do they just need a nap and a better process?

I would love to hear from the leaders out there. How do you keep your people motivated and engaged when the daily grind gets heavy?