Michael
Polk

In 2019, Michael Polk stepped down after eight years as CEO of Newell Brands, the consumer giant behind Sharpie, Rubbermaid, Crock-Pot and Yankee Candle. He had carried a Fortune 500 P&L, answered to a board, and lived inside the brutal arithmetic of the quarterly call. The obvious next chapter was a quiet one.

Instead, about a year later, he became CEO of Implus - a privately held maker of footcare, fitness and sporting-goods brands headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. Sof Sole insoles. Yaktrax ice grips. Spenco supports. TriggerPoint foam rollers. These are the products that live in the bottom of your gym bag and the back of the hall closet. They are not glamorous. That, more or less, is the point.

For Polk, the move was a return to the part of the job he actually likes. At a company of a few hundred people, there are no layers to work through, no committee standing between an idea and the shelf. "I spend much more time doing the brand and business development work directly with my team," he has said, "as opposed to focusing on resource allocation and having to work through layers in the organization."

It is a strange thing to want. A man who has run divisions on four continents choosing the company where he can stand at the workbench. But it tells you everything about how he thinks: the work is the reward, and the work is hands-on.

Implus is the kind of company that succeeds by being invisible. You don't buy a "consumer accessories conglomerate." You buy the thing that stops your sneaker from slipping, the cushion that saves your heel on mile twelve, the cleat that keeps you upright on an icy driveway. Implus owns the brands behind those small, decisive purchases, and sells them across retail, e-commerce and wholesale around the world.

It is a portfolio business, and portfolios are exactly what Polk has spent a career untangling. The skill he honed at Kraft, Unilever and Newell - knowing which brands to feed, which to fix, and which to let go - is the same skill that runs Durham.

He is a first-generation American. His father emigrated from Austria during World War II; his mother was born in Montreal. He grew up between New Jersey and Connecticut, the kind of upbringing that tends to make a person both careful and hungry.

At Cornell he studied operations research and industrial engineering - a degree that teaches you to see systems where other people see chaos. But the detail worth keeping is this: he sang. Polk performed with the Cornell University Glee Club and the a cappella group The Hangovers, and played hockey besides. The future turnaround CEO spent his college years harmonizing in stairwells.

Then Harvard Business School, and the long climb began. The engineer who learned to optimize a production line would spend thirty years optimizing brand portfolios instead. The instincts never changed - just the scale.