Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

While technology and consumer companies dominate headlines, the industrial sector remains a critical, if frequently underappreciated, pillar of the US economy. And much of the sector’s historically reliable strength and adaptability can be attributed to the small- and mid-cap industrial companies that make up what authors call the “Titanium Economy.” These companies form the backbone of American industry and generate an outsize economic impact relative to their modest share of the workforce and GDP.

Titanium Economy players have several inherent advantages over their larger industrial peers, including greater agility, faster decision-making, deep expertise, long-serving employees, and strong community ties. In fact, leading small- and mid-cap companies are leveraging these advantages to power a new wave of global industrial innovation. They are the dynamic force propelling emerging trends such as data center growth and electrification, readily adapting to market changes. Flexible and nimble, these small- and mid-cap businesses are fueling a new wave of industrial innovation around the world, supplying critical parts and services throughout the economy. The global industrial sector cannot grow without these smaller players.

Looking ahead, the Titanium Economy holds immense potential to continue empowering US growth and innovation. By embracing leading companies’ strategies for digital and AI transformation, programmatic M&A, workforce development, and more, the broader Titanium Economy can unlock significant value and expand its competitive edge. Notably, several former mid-cap players have become industry leaders in the past decade and have some of the world’s largest market capitalizations. Their growth highlights how rapidly small- and mid-cap players can create considerable value. And as the Titanium Economy continues to evolve, its leading companies offer a compelling blueprint for sustained and inclusive growth.

In the dynamic landscape of the industrial sector, one group of Titanium Economy companies has consistently outperformed its peers. How? By embracing a set of strategic imperatives. These leaders have demonstrated that success in a rapidly evolving economic environment requires deliberate choices and disciplined execution, and they are charting a path that others can follow to unlock value and drive consistent growth.

Leading Titanium Economy companies adapt, grow, and maintain their competitive edge through six strategic imperatives: driving digital and AI transformations; staying attuned to macroeconomic trends through proactive strategic portfolio allocation; pursuing holistic transformations that enhance both top-line growth and bottom-line profitability; executing programmatic M&A; innovating products to meet evolving customer needs; and investing in their workforce.

The industrial sector is a bastion of economic resilience and growth in the United States and globally; Titanium Economy companies within it are spearheading the innovation that will shape the sector’s future as well as the global economy. As the Titanium Economy continues to evolve, unlocking its full potential will depend on broad adoption of the deliberate choices and disciplined execution demonstrated by its leading companies. To navigate today’s complex and dynamic landscape, small- and mid-cap company leaders should prioritize identifying high-growth micro-verticals, crafting programmatic M&A strategies, and embedding AI-enabled transformation into their core operations. With data-driven insights and analysis, businesses of all sizes can address challenges, capitalize on emerging opportunities, unlock value, build resilience, and position themselves for sustained success in the evolving industrial economy.

Early days of uncertainty we experienced during COVID-19 remind us a lot of where we are now with AI. The technology is clearly here, spreading everywhere, and it is not going away. But what will it do? What effect will it have on our society? Will it make life better, or worse? How will we know? What’s the plan? Who should we even believe about the various ways possible futures may pan out?

We’re all sitting uncomfortably with AI right now. It’s coming from the top down. The CEOs of the big AI companies caution us that this technology may very well take all of our jobs. Or that if it doesn’t live up to that hype, it might just crash the economy instead.

Or maybe both things will happen.  It is a truism that investors hate uncertainty. Well! We are all investors in our own future. The promise of AI is so powerful, and so very compelling. Who among us is not in favor of curing all diseases? Who among us is not in favor of limitless clean energy or an end to the climate crisis? But right now, at least, the path immediately ahead of us looks far less appealing.

Data centers are running up our power bills and polluting our air. Robots are offering up lists of kill targets, and in some cases blowing people up on the other end of those lists. In professional conversations, it is increasingly impossible to tell if we are being over-reliant on AI or not using it enough. Slop overruns our phones and feeds. The language of social media—especially on that scourge LinkedIn—and blog posts and newsletters and even big-J journalism increasingly reads like an output from Claude. Our apps are all getting injections of AI, like it or not. Employers are shedding roles by the thousands in the name of AI efficiency. People are succumbing to its dark mirror and losing their grasp on reality. We’re told the next model is so powerful, and so potentially dangerous and terrifying, that we can’t even release it. Not yet. (But soon! Don’t worry, soon.) 

It’s buying things while we sleep. It’s discovering the structure of proteins. It’s telling children to kill themselves. It’s telling children to kill themselves. No wonder most people say AI makes them nervous. 

Is this what we signed up for? Is today the day? Did the drones wake up? Did it achieve consciousness? Is it alive? (No. Not yet. Go back to bed.)

The 21st-century average American lies in bed staring at their phone. They should be sleeping. They should read a book. They should take a melatonin. Instead they are deep in conversation with a math equation. Talking for hours and ages to melted sand.

As the novel coronavirus became covid-19 and eventually just plain covid, we learned a lot about it. We learned what to expect. We built tools that helped us track, and prevent, its spread. We created vaccines. And in time, we reopened the schools. We reopened life. 

We have not really begun to make this progress with AI. Why, for example, is this dashboard not found on a government website? Where is the large-scale industrial policy for transforming our grid to support massive data center build-outs? Where is the plan for what happens when millions of people—software engineers, paralegals, truck drivers, translators, journalists, janitors—are suddenly out of work? 

We need tools to better understand what’s coming, how it is spreading, how it is changing things. We need to be able to see its actual effect on the economy, rather than the fumbling rough sense we have now. Until we can track it, understand it, and predict it, we will be left with uncertainty and malaise, bleaching our broccoli in a cloth mask.

The goal of any corporate leader is to effect behavioral change: to move people to achieve certain outcomes. For employees, those outcomes might include high engagement and performance; for customers, purchasing decisions; and for both, loyalty and advocacy (being willing to recommend working for or doing business with the organization). By those standards, leaders today are struggling. 

Faced with this landscape, what can leaders do to generate sustainable high performance, loyalty, and resilience from their people and genuine commitment from their customers? And what critical capability must leaders develop to stop the drift and instead lift their teams and their customers up into a world that’s more productive for all?

Most leaders, the author believes, are looking for answers in the wrong place. There’s a deeply held management belief that the key to growth is fixing what’s broken. But for more than 25 years my research has found that the opposite is true: Focusing on improving deficiencies produces compliance at best—and disengagement at worst. In reality, people and organizations grow by building on their strengths.

To truly move people toward positive outcomes, leaders must pay attention to what the author calls “extreme positive experiences”—which make employees speak with genuine passion about their work and customers not just prefer but love a product or service—and then operationalize what’s working in those experiences.

The Power of Extreme Positives.  Decades of research show that extreme positive experiences are very different from mediocre ones. That’s why you can’t achieve them by fixing what’s broken. You must figure out what’s already pulling a small number of people to the very top of the positive-feeling meter—and then design for that deliberately and at scale.  Extreme positives are different.

The author has identified five conditions that give rise to extremely positive feelings. As a leader looking to change behavior, you must figure out how to create experiences that meet these conditions.

1. Control.  Research on perceived control and self-efficacy shows that without clarity and choice, people will not love an experience—even if the other four conditions are met. Many leaders miss this. They try to build connection or personalization without first answering the unspoken question that every person brings to a new experience: “What is this, and how should I engage with it?”
2. Harmony.  According to research on psychological safety, people will not take interpersonal risks or challenge themselves unless they first feel emotionally secure. Experiences that people love meet them where they are before asking them to move somewhere else. Creating a feeling of harmony requires answering each person’s unspoken question,“Do you know what I am feeling, and do you care?”
3. Significance.  Significance is the feeling that our own preferences, talents, histories, and quirks—our stories—matter. Research on personalization by Axel Honneth and on what Morris Rosenberg and B.C. McCullough first labeled “mattering” finds that people engage with experiences more deeply when they feel known. To design for significance you must address the question, “Do you know my story, and do you care?”
4. Warmth.  Humans perform best when they feel supported; not lonely. (Dare I say it? When they feel loved.) So to design love in, you must answer your employee’s or customer’s question: “Who is with me, and how can they help?”
5. Growth.  Finally, humans bond to experiences that make them bigger—more skilled, more elevated. When people feel more capable at the end of an experience than at the start, they remain connected to the people or organization that helped them get there.

B2B sales is fiercely competitive. Companies selling big-ticket products and services to other businesses must design solutions that meet their customers’ specific needs with a provable value proposition. Increasingly, that means engaging in value-based sales, where the benefits to the customer are defined, quantified, and managed by the vendor. That’s a challenging practice to get right: Many industrial companies fail to move on from piloting solutions to delivering them at scale.

To improve their customer value propositions and their profit margins, IEMs are creating value-based industrial solutions.  The authors define them as customized and integrated combinations of products, service, and digital technology that allow companies to achieve profitability and sustainability simultaneously by providing value in use.

Offering value-based industrial solutions requires manufacturers to shift from selling products to fulfilling complex customer needs — that is, to a value-in-use business logic, where the value created is shared between manufacturer and customer.

The authors’ research shows that it is relatively easy for an IEM to create an initial value-based industrial solution. Doing so on a one-off basis for a single, key customer limits the scope of financial commitments.  However, scaling these solutions is much more challenging than delivering pilot initiatives: Offering these solutions across a large and diverse customer base requires a repeatable, structured process and strong, entrenched capabilities.

The authors’ analysis shows that organizations that have been able to scale value-based industrial solutions have established a set of prerequisite capabilities in the initial phase of designing and piloting such offerings. In the second phase, where scaling gains traction, they have gone on to develop additional capabilities required to repeatedly sell and deliver those solutions.  In the framework the authors developed from their research, they have defined three core scaling capabilities for each of the two phases and the 17 practices that are key to executing each phase successfully.

Phase 1: Scaling prerequisites. The groundwork for developing value-based industrial solutions comprises the following three steps.  Develop a solution strategy, create a dual value proposition, and design for modularity and customization.

Phase 2: Scaling execution. As detailed below, scaling execution centers on the capabilities needed to deliver value-based industrial solutions repeatedly and across a variety of customer engagements while ensuring that financial objectives are met.  Manage ecosystem contributions, ensure financial viability, and expand the addressable market.

Based on theirr analysis, the authors offer the following guidance to managers pursuing a strategy of developing and marketing value-based solutions broadly.  A) Take a systematic and holistic approach to scaling them. B)  Pay special attention to getting the dual value proposition, solution configuration, partner alignment, revenue model, and delivery organization.  And C)  Misalignment or poor timing — such as engaging global partners before a clear internal strategy is likely to create bottlenecks, resource misallocations, and scaling fatigue. Therefore, make sure that scaling practices are conducted in the suggested order.

If you’re a CEO or a VP of HR, you can usually spot an executive coaching candidate before they realize it for themselves. From your vantage point, you get to see things that may be invisible to the executive living inside their own day-to-day world, like attrition patterns, succession bench depth, who’s getting promoted on other teams and who’s carrying more workload than they should be.

The hard part isn’t seeing the signs. Rather, it’s knowing when the signs add up to a candidate for executive leadership coaching compared with a training problem, a performance problem or just a leader having a rough quarter.  These signs have a few things in common: They’re observable from where you sit; They tend to resist the usual leadership development tools, like 360s, leadership courses and books from the airport bookstore; They resist those tools because the gap that justifies coaching isn’t a knowledge gap; it’s the leader’s behavior under pressure.

Here are five signs that the leader you have in mind is genuinely an executive coaching candidate.

They’re Tolerating A Low Performer Everyone Else Can See.  When a leader covers for a known weak performer, it destroys the leader’s credibility and makes it politically impossible to hold anyone else accountable.

Their High Performers Are Burning Out Or Quitting.  This is the first sign HR tends to notice, because it shows up in the data you’re already tracking. You’ve got A-players leaving the team, engagement scores in that area are dropping, and stay interviews surface frustration about workload imbalance. Exit interviews are vague, with lots of “personal reasons” and “new opportunity” language.

Nobody On Their Team Gets Promoted.  Look at the leader’s direct reports over the past two or three years. How many have moved up? Not laterally, not into adjacent roles on someone else’s team, but genuinely promoted into bigger executive roles. For the leader you have in mind, the honest answer is often zero or close to it.

They Get Defensive When Challenged.  This is the sign that shows up most clearly when the leader gets feedback. Imagine that a leader has just gone through a 360 assessment or you’re analyzing open-ended responses to an engagement survey. You read the comments and you see phrases like “doesn’t take feedback well,” “hard to give bad news to,” “argues when challenged,” or the polite version, which is usually “passionate about being right.” This is clearly a leader that doesn’t respond well to getting challenged.

Their Team Is Afraid To Tell Them The Truth.  Bad news arrives late to this leader, and they get surprised by something their team knew about for three weeks. Direct reports rehearse before going into their office, and staff meetings are oddly quiet, with one or two people doing most of the talking. Their engagement survey usually shows decent “satisfaction with my manager” scores but low scores on psychological safety, which is a reliable tell that people are reporting what seems safe to report.

When asked about brand loyalty by eMarketer in 2025, almost two-thirds of survey participants said customer loyalty was on the decline. However, there’s an antidote to this phenomenon: building emotional connections with your buyers.  A shopper who has multiple positive experiences with your people, products, or services is more likely to come back. Plus, there’s a higher chance they’ll gush about your brand online, which can influence future purchases.  

4 ways founders can slow the declining in customers loyalty

1. Host live events.  Many brands offer real-time experiences like conferences, conventions, and entertainment-based events such as concerts or competitions to create controllable emotional touchpoints between themselves and their customers.
2. Encourage user-generated content.  The most effective marketing doesn’t necessarily come from inside your organization. In fact, user-generated content (UGC) can drive far more sales than your carefully written advertising pieces and slogans.
3. Provide outstanding customer service.  You’ll always have unhappy customers who call your service and support lines. Instead of seeing them as problems, see them as opportunities. If you can satisfy a customer through unexpectedly good service, you may just win a buyer for life.
4. Tell your buyers’ most riveting stories.  As part of your content marketing development, look for ways to tell stories that connect your products or services to real customers. For example, you may want to highlight how your brand has played an important role in a family’s life for many years or how your brand showed up for someone when they needed you most.

Most companies treat resilience as something you demonstrate in a crisis. In reality, by the time a crisis arrives, the outcome is already in motion. Systems, leadership and culture are either built for pressure — or they are not. Across high-growth companies, turnarounds and startups, the same pattern shows up: the organizations that navigate disruption best are not improvising in the moment. They are executing on foundations built when conditions were stable. Here is what they do differently.

1. They design for flexibility — not just efficiency.  Leadership teams often say they value adaptability, but few actually build for it. Success tends to create rigidity — processes harden, decision-making slows and what once enabled speed becomes something to protect. Over time, efficiency crowds out flexibility.  Resilient companies take the opposite approach. They design systems where decisions can move quickly without constant escalation, and where teams are trusted to act without waiting for perfect direction. Resources can be reallocated as priorities shift, allowing the organization to respond without breaking its operating model. If your system only works under predictable conditions, it will not hold under pressure.
2. They make change part of the culture.  One of the most common leadership mistakes is treating change as an exception. Markets shift, customer expectations evolve and competitive dynamics rarely stand still. When organizations only change in response to poor performance, people begin to associate change with failure. Resilient companies normalize change through consistent communication and repetition of direction. They build the expectation that evolution is part of the job, not a signal that something is wrong. When change becomes routine, execution becomes faster, less emotional and more effective.
3. They build leadership depth before they need it.  Crisis exposes leaders for who they have always been. Many companies struggle under pressure, not because the strategy is flawed, but because there is not enough leadership depth to execute it.  many startups are one or two people away from failure, even when they look successful on the surface. This is not just a startup problem — many established companies are more fragile than they appear if leadership is too concentrated.  Resilient organizations invest early in developing leaders across the business.  When authority is distributed and decision-making is clear, the organization can respond quickly at every level. If everything depends on a handful of people, the system is inherently fragile.
4. They act on signals before the numbers move.  Strong performance can hide real risk. In multiple situations, financial results looked solid while underlying signals told a different story — customer behavior was shifting, friction was increasing, and the model was quietly under pressure.  Resilient companies stay close to what is happening on the ground. They listen to frontline employees, track subtle changes in customer behavior and treat small signals as early warnings rather than noise. The most important indicators often appear long before results deteriorate.  They also accept that decisions rarely come with complete information. They build the habit of acting with incomplete data — moving, testing, adjusting and refining as they go. The ability to adapt after action is often more valuable than delaying decisions in search of perfect clarity.
5. The real risk is waiting too long.  Most companies do not fail because of a single event. They fail because they delay, overlook early signals and continue relying on what worked in the past even as conditions change. Success can reinforce that behavior. When things are working, it is easy to assume they will keep working. Resilient companies challenge that assumption by evolving while performance is still strong, not after it declines.  As Gallup notes, employees are often less prepared for change than leaders assume and need a clear “true north” during uncertainty. That makes proactive leadership even more critical: expectations, direction and adaptability must be built in advance, not during disruption.