Before Jim Fitterling had a chemical company to run, he had a trumpet part to get right. At the University of Missouri, the mechanical engineering student played in Marching Mizzou. In 2022, he returned for Homecoming as honorary conductor. The former member of the brass section was now chairman and CEO of Dow. For once, the instruction to get everyone moving in the same direction came with a baton.
It is an appealing footnote to a career usually described through plants, polymers and job titles. It also provides a useful place to begin. Fitterling spent more than four decades inside one company, learning different parts of it before taking charge. On July 1, 2026, he handed the chief executive job to Karen S. Carter and became executive chairman. The person at the front changed; the work continued.
The handover brings his career into focus without tying it into a neat bow. There is the engineering graduate who stayed, the executive whose assignments took him across Asia, and the gay leader who made his identity public in an industry more accustomed to discussing production volumes. There is also a business facing difficult choices. A conductor can set a tempo. He cannot abolish the acoustics.
The long way round to Midland
Fitterling grew up near Kansas City, in a small Missouri town. Both his parents were teachers. His family liked sports, and his account of those years places him in a world a considerable distance from international chemical negotiations. He went to the University of Missouri, earned his mechanical engineering degree in 1983 and joined Dow in 1984.
University life was busy beyond the engineering curriculum. His student activities included leadership positions in FarmHouse fraternity and work with the Missouri Students Association, alongside the marching band. The trumpet is the detail that survives most readily in the imagination. Equations and ensemble playing make a respectable combination: one asks whether the answer works; the other makes the consequences of poor coordination immediately audible.
Dow appealed to him for its camaraderie and collegiate atmosphere. Staying there did not mean staying put. His early work included sales, marketing and supply chains, followed by management assignments involving liquid separations, FilmTec, Thailand and the SCG-Dow joint ventures. He later ran The OPTIMAL Group, the Malaysian venture linking Dow with the country's state-owned oil company, and took on wider regional responsibilities.
Those assignments put commercial and operating responsibilities alongside his technical education. They also gave the Missouri graduate an international life. In a 2021 essay, Fitterling wrote that he had spent eleven years living in Asia. He met his husband there. The region was therefore something more intimate than a set of markets on a corporate presentation.
He returned to the United States in 2006 to lead Dow's polyethylene business envelope. By then, the route to Midland had included customers, subsidiaries and joint ventures overseas. When he eventually occupied the chief executive's office, it was after years spent inside the machinery of the business, including the human arrangements that allow companies from different countries to work together.
A company takes itself apart
Fitterling's rise through senior leadership coincided with an unusually complicated corporate reconstruction. He became vice chairman of business operations in 2014 and president and chief operating officer in 2016. Dow and DuPont completed their merger in 2017, creating a combined organization intended to separate into three publicly traded companies.
It was a merger with a departure plan built in. The eventual businesses would concentrate on materials science, agriculture and specialty products. Fitterling served as chief operating officer of DowDuPont's Materials Science Division while preparations for separation proceeded. He became Dow CEO in 2018; the independent Dow emerged in April 2019.
The distinction matters. His appointment preceded the new company's independent trading life. He had to help prepare the organization he would then lead. Howard Ungerleider was named president-elect and chief financial officer alongside him in the planning period. The familiar Dow name concealed a substantial exercise in deciding what belonged together and how it would operate afterward.
The business case emphasized materials sold into packaging, infrastructure and consumer applications. Fitterling's subsequent leadership would be judged on the performance of that more focused company. In 2022, chemical industry peers voted him ICIS CEO of the Year. The ballot considered profitability, environmental and social performance, innovation and portfolio management. Recognition arrived from people who understood how much pipework sits beneath a strategy.
The part of himself he stopped leaving outside
There was another change, made before he became CEO. In 2014, Fitterling publicly came out to Dow employees. In a later National Coming Out Day message, he called bringing his whole self to work an empowering decision. His advice was direct: “To those coming out today, you deserve to be who you are.”
He had already been open with people in his working life, including Andrew Liveris, his predecessor as Dow CEO. Public visibility extended that circle. A colleague no longer needed a private conversation to know that a gay executive could progress through the operating ranks and into the company's leadership. The example was available to people he would never meet.
“With D&I, start with #inclusion.”
Jim Fitterling, 2020
His explanation went beyond recruiting a varied workforce. He argued that inclusion had to reach advancement opportunities and decision making if diversity was to endure. That gives the idea a practical test. Who receives responsibility? Whose judgment carries weight? Who can imagine staying long enough to build a career? Those questions belong in the operation of a company as much as in its public statements.
His network around this work included Todd Sears of Out Leadership, Sarah Kate Ellis of GLAAD and Beth Brooke of EY. He has described speaking with them while considering being out at work. The story is a reminder that even someone moving toward the top of a large organization can seek counsel from people outside its hierarchy.
His overseas life also surfaced in his public advocacy. Writing against anti-Asian prejudice in 2021, he described his years in Asia and his marriage. He made the connection plainly personal. This was a corporate leader addressing discrimination while explaining why the issue reached into his own home. His authority came with a biography attached.
The future has a construction schedule
Another part of Fitterling's public role has concerned what happens to the materials Dow makes. Under his leadership, the company became a founding member of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. He also supported an international, legally binding plastics pollution agreement, with an emphasis on circularity and the infrastructure needed to collect and manage discarded material.
That position reflects the perspective of a plastics producer. Dow's argument links product design, recycled content, recycling technologies and waste systems. The scope is larger than an individual package. A resin can be designed for another life, but collection and processing arrangements have to exist for that life to happen. The factory and the rubbish bin inhabit the same economic system, however rarely they appear in the same photograph.
Manufacturing emissions present a different engineering problem. Dow's Path2Zero project at Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, aims to build an integrated ethylene and derivatives complex with net-zero Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Those categories concern operations and purchased energy. The ambition should be read with that boundary intact.
The calendar has moved. Dow paused construction in 2025 amid difficult market conditions. In January 2026, it reaffirmed the project with a revised schedule: the first phase targeted for the end of 2029, the second for the end of 2030. These are expected startup dates, with the risks that accompany a major industrial investment.
Two phases. A longer runway.
Company targets, not completed milestones. Emissions ambition covers Scope 1 and Scope 2.
The sequence captures a tension running through Fitterling's later CEO years. Long industrial projects need commitments that extend beyond a quarter. Their financing still depends on present conditions. An executive can believe in a plant's eventual advantages and postpone the expense of building it. The difficult part is explaining the interval to everyone waiting for the promised result.
Someone else takes the stand
By the beginning of 2026, Dow was confronting a prolonged industry downturn. In January, it announced Transform to Outperform, a program targeting at least $2 billion in near-term operating EBITDA improvement. It expected severance costs associated with approximately 4,500 roles. The language of simplification came with consequences for thousands of working lives.
Those numbers belong beside the awards and statements of ambition. They describe the pressure surrounding the leadership transition. Carter, then chief operating officer, was already publicly involved in the program. When Dow announced her appointment as CEO in April, it described the decision as the culmination of a succession process developed over several years.
Fitterling's move into the executive chair role took effect on July 1. His responsibilities now center on long-term strategy, governance and external relationships, while Carter leads the company. The distinction leaves him close to the institution he joined in 1984, with a different set of duties toward its future.
“Serving as CEO of Dow has been the privilege of a lifetime,” he said when the transition was announced. The phrase fits a career spent with one employer through changes of geography, corporate structure and personal visibility. It also leaves the next performance to others. The former trumpet player has had his turn at the front. The measure of the handover will be how well Dow keeps time.