CEO Alex Bombeck is back with the latest interview in his Talking Transformation series. This time it’s a candid conversation with Peter Gibbons—a 25+ year supply chain veteran and C-suite exec who's led major business transformations at Starbucks, Mattel, 3M, and TireHub.
Together they confront common leadership contradictions - from chasing AI without solving real problems, to avoiding uncomfortable truths when business is booming. This three-part video series reveals why turning your vision into real, measurable value requires more than strategy and exposes the blind spots that sabotage even the most successful leaders.
Peter Gibbons’ Leadership Highlights:
- Group President, Enterprise Supply Chain at 3M, overseeing operations and supply chain for the $20B+ industrial giant
- CEO and Board Chair of TireHub (Bridgestone & Goodyear joint venture), building a culture-first, customer-centric organization
- Chief Supply Chain Officer at Mattel, Inc., managing global product engineering, procurement, and manufacturing
- EVP Global Supply Chain Operations at Starbucks, directing worldwide sourcing, distribution, and logistics
Ready to make your strategy a reality? Watch the complete three-part series.
AI Adoption & Leadership Blind Spots: Why Leaders Fail to Bring People Along in AI Transformation
Interview Focus: Executives get distracted by the imperative to adopt AI without connecting it to real business problems or bringing their teams along. This conversation reveals why leaders address the technology while neglecting their people —and what must change to truly leverage AI for competitive advantage.
"Employees will naturally resist technology because they will see it as a threat versus an enabler. Leaders have a requirement, an obligation to leverage technology. Certainly, if you're a publicly traded company and you aren't talking about AI and you're the CEO on an analyst call, your share price is going to go down.
...you've got to be addressing it. So, they address the technology, but then they don't address the people... how do we get past that?
Organizational Design & Structural Change: Why Org Design Alone Isn't Enough
Interview Focus: Restructuring doesn't drive change. This conversation exposes why org design alone is just one piece of the puzzle—but the real work happens in the workflows it enables, the alignment to business culture and the value it delivers.
“I'm sitting there at the top of this big empire, getting great results, but there's so much I don't know.
There's so much unknown about what it's like to be on the manufacturing line shift… Think of all the stuff we don’t know about what is going on in our organization. How do we mine data to help us reveal more of that?
People at the top of organizations need to be a lot more demanding in the question - are we truly trying to transform and change?”
Data & Leadership Transparency: The Uncomfortable Truth: Why Successful Leaders Avoid Looking at What's Really Broken
Interview Focus: When businesses are growing and profitable, leaders stop asking hard questions. This conversation examines why executives claim to value transparency while actively avoiding the uncomfortable truths that data reveals.
"This is something that I've said to leaders before and admittedly have fallen victim to myself… When things are going well, when businesses are growing and profitable, nobody's looking for what's not working. And in my personal experience, both in my own business as well as working with clients, that is usually when things actually start going the worst, right?
…If we just spend 20% of each week, when businesses are on that rocket ship, pushing people to tell each other what's really not working well, you could sustain better growth."
Watch the full episodes to hear how leaders are breaking free from reductive thinking and building truly adaptive organizations.
Follow Alex Bombeck on LinkedIn | Follow Peter Gibbons on LinkedIn
