Jul. 17—Gautam Gundiah

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Gautam Gundiah at APL Engineered Materials in Urbana. (Robin Scholz/The News-Gazette)

The leader who inspires GAUTAM GUNDIAH more than any other? He'll go with former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, a regular on any list of the world's most powerful women.

And it's not because the first chapter of his story reads a lot like hers: both born, raised and educated in India before moving to the U.S. for postgrad work — him at UC-Santa Barbara, then the Berkeley Research Lab, her at Yale's School of Management — on their way to heading up businesses.

It's what Nooyi did once she got to the top of the org chart that most impresses Gundiah, president of the Urbana-based chemical manufacturing company APL Engineered Materials.

"Under her leadership, the company increased its profitability while also working to improve environmental sustainability and offer new, healthy foods," he says.

"Following her retirement, she talks about increasing diversity in workplaces, work-life balance and child/elderly care. Each of these are important issues."

Gundiah, who's coming up on his four-year anniversary as APL president, took time out to answer questions from in the 137th installment of our weekly speed read spotlighting leaders of organizations big and small.

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My one unbreakable rule of the workplace is ... do not change the Columbia Street Roastery coffee blend.

But jokes aside, employees need to always be respectful to one another.

The hardest thing about being a leader is ... terminating an employee. As we have gradually pivoted our business from legacy products to new ones, we have unfortunately had to do some of these over the years.

While not one is easy, the really difficult ones that are those that are done for business reasons, versus violating company policies.

My philosophy on meetings is ... regular meetings with internal and external stakeholders are important. I find smaller meetings where attendees come prepared to be most productive.

I try and begin each meeting with small talk — trying to understand how the participants are doing and any issues they are going through.

Often, these are difficult to communicate by emails. And be sure we have summary with action items so that we are all on the same page.

I can't live without ... my family. With little kids and a much-loved puppy, life is busy and exhausting.

I don't say this often enough, but they are the source of my strength and happiness.

My favorite moments in this job come ... each time a product reaches commercial scale after going through customer validations on the development and pilot scales. It's extremely fulfilling.

Three words I hope my staff would use to describe me are ... helpful, approachable and problem-solver.

On my office walls, you'll find ... photos of my kids, whiteboards with scribbles about important projects, a periodic table and other technical charts.

I'm frugal in that ... my work requires me to travel internationally and domestically. I find taking the Peoria Charter shuttle to O'Hare instead of flying out of Champaign — sorry, Willard — saves my company significant dollars that could be put to productive use elsewhere.

If I could trade places for a week with any other business person in town ... I'll take the liberty of extending the "in town" radius to Bloomington-Normal and would like to trade a week with RJ Scaringe, the CEO of Rivian.

He has done an amazing job starting Rivian, raising capital, setting up manufacturing, going public and adding thousands of jobs in central Illinois.

It would be wonderful to have a front-row seat to see his strategy to navigate the complex EV supply chains while continuing to grow the business.

I wind down after work by ... spending time with my family. Over the last year, I enjoyed coaching soccer for my son's team at the Champaign Park District.

I like to cook and do it together with my wife while talking about our respective days.

When it comes to the last luxury in which I indulged ... we purchased a Volvo XC90 SUV just before the pandemic that has served us very well.

We love it and have done a few road trips and explored local parks and forest preserves.

As far as my most beneficial college classes go ... I took mostly technical courses in graduate school. While I enjoyed them, most of them are not directly relevant to my current responsibilities at APL.

All the business skills I have learned are working with some excellent mentors, reading books and regularly listening to business-focused podcasts.

I would highly recommend "How I Built This," by Guy Raz, which describes the journey of inventors to create global companies.

I'm up and at 'em every day ... between 5 and 5:30 a.m. I'm an early-morning person.

I begin my day by catching up with our teams in Asia, where we export a majority of our products. A few mornings each week, I try to do a short workout.

And then, along with my wife, help get our kids ready and out to school.

My exercise routine involves ... getting out for a run a couple of times and logging at least a total of 10 running miles each week. I try to do at least a 30-minute walk with my dog each day to help us stay healthy.

On a 1-to-10 scale, the impact of the pandemic has been ... an 8. Thanks to efforts of our elected officials and the Illinois Manufacturing Association, manufacturers were considered essential in Illinois and permitted to remain open throughout the pandemic.

Coming up with policies to keep APL's employees safe, especially in the initial days, was challenging. As a parent with young kids, we have been constantly worried for their safety.

However, we got to spend a lot more time as a family and have been fortunate to be in Champaign during the pandemic. Nowhere else in the world would we have had such easy access to information, testing and vaccines. Kudos to the CU Public Health District, IDPH, Champaign County EDC and other organizations that supported us.

On the business front, we mostly retained our awesome employees and added a few new ones as our business continued to grow during the pandemic.