After leading one of the largest consumer goods companies in America, Michael Polk Newell Brands did not expect his most fulfilling work to come at a small, privately owned fitness accessories business. Yet that is exactly how he describes his current role at Implus LLC, a company he joined in 2020 at the invitation of Berkshire Partners following a brief retirement from Newell Brands.
Comparing Two Very Different Roles
Polk served as CEO of Newell Brands from 2011 to 2019, overseeing an organization of more than fifty thousand employees and guiding its shift from a holding company into a streamlined operating business. Before that, he built his career at Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods, and Unilever. Those roles came with scale, visibility, and layers of management between Polk and the people executing his decisions. Implus offers none of that scale, but Michael Polk has said the tradeoff has been worth it.
Getting Back to the Work Itself
Much of Polk’s satisfaction comes from how directly he now engages with his team. “I spend much more time doing the brand and business development work directly with my team as opposed to focusing on resource allocation and having to work through layers in the organization to influence the demand-creation or cost-reduction choices people are making,” he says. That closeness to daily decisions, he has explained, echoes his earlier years as a marketing and sales executive before he moved into broader leadership roles. Polk still reports to a Board of Directors and owners, just as he did at Newell Brands, so the accountability has not gone away. What has changed is where he spends his energy, and Polk has made clear that collaborating one-on-one with employees on brand and business development, rather than managing through committees and approval chains, has made this the most rewarding period of his professional life so far. Refer to this article for more information.
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