Successful business leaders think with vision and creativity and bring novel perceptions based on a wide range of experiences they have amassed on their way to the C-suite. They are not just experts in their industries but thoughtful leaders who look at challenges differently.

Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation (LVEDC) explored those qualities and the experiences that developed them as part of the Lehigh Valley Suite Spot series, a Q&A with the region’s executives. Here is a peek at some unique qualities that some of those executives bring to the board room.

Thomas Ripsam, Martin Guitar CEO

Thomas Ripsam is the first CEO at C.F. Martin & Co. not descended from the 190-year-old company’s founder. But his affection for the iconic guitar made in the Lehigh Valley runs deep. He’s been playing the guitar since his teenage years while growing up in Germany, even recently recording an original album. He nurtured those musical skills even as he earned his MBA at Columbia University and became a business strategist, addressing challenges at companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. He was most recently a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers before coming to Martin in 2020.

Here is what Ripsam had to say on the role creativity plays in business and leadership:

We live in a world that is changing at an accelerated pace and that change is presenting many opportunities and challenges. In that context, I believe creativity plays a very important role for business and leadership, to remain successful now and in the future. There are many examples that come to mind.  Leaders have to be able to reimagine the role their business can play, how to generate value, the future of work for their business, how to keep co-workers energized and engaged, how to use technology to do business, how to be more sustainable, how to work with external and internal stakeholders and the like.  To tackle many of these issues requires creativity.  Being creative, though, doesn’t mean you should constantly change who you are or your values or take short cuts on things like quality.

Mark Dillon, Bio Med Sciences CEO

In the last 35 years, Mark Dillon has built a business on his college thesis which led to the development of a novel brand of skin products that, among other uses, help burn patients. Bio Med Sciences signature products use Silon technology, blending the best properties of silicone and polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon) to mimic the protective and permeable characteristics of skin. The artificial skin doesn’t stick to the wound, as other bandages do, and complicate healing. But he originally went to Alfred University because of its prestigious New York State College of Ceramics; he wanted to study pottery and sculpture before he pivoted to material sciences. He still makes pottery at the Baum School of Art and Banana Factory.

Here is some advice that Dillon has on the role of the arts when preparing for a career:

A friend’s daughter was trying to figure out what she wanted to do and was thinking something medical, and I gave some advice about what I thought about the field of medicine and where this kind of engineering was going.

Toward the end, I asked: are you creative? Do you do any art or anything like that? You really want to foster creativity because once you have the engineering tools and, if you can keep the creativity, you will be an inventor. You’ll come up with an idea and know how to pull it off.

It’s all about looking at something with a totally different perspective or come up with an idea that somebody else wouldn’t have thought of.

Billy Cyr, Freshpet CEO

Freshpet CEO Billy Cyr began his corporate career at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. He worked there for 19 years until he led a leveraged buyout of P&G’s Sunny Delight business in 2004, partnering with private equity. The people he met during the buyout ultimately led him to Freshpet in 2016 where he leads a fast-growing company prized for its fresh, high-protein products. But his training isn’t in the traditional engineering or business fields that lead. On his father’s advice, he studied what he loved so he could learn to read analytically, write well, and formulate arguments. At Princeton University, he studied history because he loves it and then East Asian Studies because he had a language requirement.

Here is what he learned from studying Chinese:

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it probably taught me more than I’ve ever learned from anything else. Because you don’t really learn well until you struggle with something, and I was not good at it.

It taught me that there’s a completely different way of looking at things. A good example would be the world of pronouns. We’re all convinced there’s a he and she and they. In Chinese, it’s all the same. They don’t have a pronoun problem because the pronoun for she and he is the same. But they have unbelievably descriptive terms, like a sister who is older than you is called something different than a sister who is younger than you because hierarchy is important to them.

It was eye-opening to think the world doesn’t have to look at things the same way. It helped me to see things differently.