"No great idea ever makes it to market... It's great execution that does." In this episode of Team Chemistry, Steve makes the case that innovation is a team sport - a relay race where the idea is only the first leg, and the breakthrough usually lives between functions rather than inside any one of them.

Steve walks host Michael Morand through a deceptively simple product - an individually wrapped beauty wipe - that took two years, a European supplier, and an $8 million bet to reach the shelf. Along the way: why two-thirds of new products vanish within three years, what genuine dissent contributes to a team's best decisions, why "supplier-enabled innovation" beats squeezing suppliers on cost, and the line that reframes the whole conversation - the chef on the Titanic was excellent, but it didn't save the ship.

ABOUT THE GUEST Steve Weinstein has led supply chain and marketing teams at large consumer products companies for more than three decades - most of that at Johnson & Johnson, where he ran global supply chain for the Baby and Beauty franchises and led supply chain for Zarbee's Naturals, the company's fastest-growing division. Before that, he held two roles that shaped how he thinks about innovation: Director of New Venture & Innovation Sourcing and Director of Global Innovation Sourcing. Today he's the CEO at BeeCure, leading efforts to bring a new standard of wound care to market.

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why great execution, not great ideas, is what reaches the market
• The two-year, $8M story behind one individually wrapped wipe
• Why innovation lives between teams, not inside R&D
• What dissent actually contributes to a team's best decisions
• "Together we're more" - a different way to think about suppliers and partners

Team Chemistry explores the real science behind how teams work - not the motivational-poster version, but what actually happens when you put people together and ask them to do something hard.

The most important skill at work is the one no class ever covered: how teams actually function. In Episode 2, I'm sharing two articles written a year apart – "Team Dynamics: The Missing Class" and "Team Science: Connections Over Components" – that expose the same blind spot. The first names the gap. The second delivers the harder news: your team probably isn't underperforming. Your understanding of it is. Because chemistry was never about the elements alone – it's about what happens when they bond.

In the inaugural episode of Team Chemistry, host Michael Morand sits down with Cory Stern – VP and Global Head of HR for Med Tech Functions at Johnson & Johnson, founding advisor at TroopHR, and a coach who has spent more than two decades developing people across some of J&J's most complex businesses. A conversation about identity as something teams activate, environment as the real variable, and what most organizations still get backwards about helping people grow.