Kecia Steelman: From the Sales Floor to the Corner Office at Ulta Beauty
Beauty retail runs on small rituals. A customer picks up a lipstick, turns it over, sets it back down, picks up another. It is a business of tiny decisions made thousands of times a day, across thousands of stores, by people who mostly never meet each other. Kecia Steelman has spent more than a decade […]
Sue Yannaccone: From Contract Administration to the C-Suite
Some careers move sideways for years before they suddenly widen. Sue Yannaccone’s did the opposite. It has widened, steadily and almost continuously, for more than two decades, until in March 2026, she was appointed Chief Operating Officer of Compass International Holdings (NYSE: COMP), the parent company to a nine-brand portfolio that includes @properties, Better Homes […]
Manisha Gupta: From Financial Discipline to Enterprise Transformation
There is a particular kind of leader who never chases the spotlight, who instead spends her career in the columns and footnotes of financial statements, learning exactly where a company’s money leaks and exactly how to stop it. Manisha Gupta is that kind of leader. Today, she serves as Director of Strategy and Transformation at […]
Anita Iyenger: From the Front Line of Care to the Strategy Table
It is an unusual detail to find buried near the bottom of an executive biography: that before she ever touched a strategic plan, Anita Iyenger was an occupational therapist. It shapes, by her own account, everything that came after. Today, Anita serves as Senior Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim Chief Information Officer at […]
Arushi Jyoti: The Architect of Outcomes, Redefining What Strategy Looks Like in 2026
There is a particular kind of knowledge that comes not from a classroom but from circumstance. When Arushi Jyoti was twelve years old, her family moved from India to Canada. She watched her parents navigate that transition with what she describes as extraordinary grace, and she came away from it with something she could not […]
Josh Flibotte: The Quality Inspector Who Became a Software-First Furniture CEO
Somewhere between a dialysis lab in New Hampshire and a spine device inspection line in Massachusetts, a quality assurance technician started noticing something that had nothing to do with furniture at all: how much of the built environment, and the products that fill it, were made without much thought for the planet or the people […]
Dave Albert: The Turnaround Architect Building One Workplace’s Next Chapter
Factories in Reynosa, Tamaulipas do not usually turn out chief executives of American workplace design companies. Yet that is precisely where this particular story begins, on the production floor of Zenith Electronics Systems in the mid 1990s, where a young materials manager and financial analyst first learned to read a supply chain the way other […]
Ken Baugh: One Company, Nearly Four Decades of Workplace Transformation
Careers, in this industry as in most others, are usually told through a chain of job titles, each one a rung on a ladder leading somewhere else. Ken Baugh’s story resists that shape entirely. He has spent nearly four decades at the same company, joining Pivot Interiors Inc. in 1988 and eventually becoming its President […]
Joseph P. Lozowski: How a Failing Dealership Became One of North America’s Largest Interior Solutions Providers
In 2002, somebody had to want a failing business badly enough to buy it. Most people would have looked at the books and walked away. Joseph P. Lozowski looked at the same books and saw the outline of something else entirely. He is President and Chief Executive Officer of Tangram Interiors, a title he has […]
Tony Nelson: The Architect of Workplaces That Outlast the Furniture Inside Them
There is a particular kind of expertise that cannot be taught in a classroom or simulated in a training module. It accumulates slowly, through years of watching people move through spaces, of listening carefully to what a client says and even more carefully to what they do not say, of learning the difference between a […]
Matt Krall: Beyond Inspiration: Installing the Behaviors That Drive Performance
There is a moment that Matt Krall returns to, again and again, in conversation and in his work. It is not a boardroom triumph or a product launch or the signing of a consequential deal. It is, in his telling, a very ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The pressure is high. The data is incomplete. The calendar […]
J. Michael Daniel: How One Man Turned Government Service Into a Force for Collective Security
There is something quietly paradoxical about the work J. Michael Daniel does every day. He spends his time convincing rival companies, companies that compete aggressively for the same clients, the same contracts, and the same credibility, to hand each other their most sensitive intelligence. He asks them to trust one another with information they would […]
