The Valspar Corporation is one of the largest global paints and coatings manufacturers in the world, providing coatings and intermediates to businesses and consumers. Since 1806, Valspar has been dedicated to innovation, quality, and customer service. They challenge themselves to answer marketplace demands, increase product performance, and design solutions that protect people and the planet. With more than $4.5 billion in sales and more than 10,500 employees, Valspar delivers advanced coatings solutions with best-in-class appearance, performance, protection, and sustainability to customers in more than 100 countries.

Simon Yeung leads research and development for Valspar's consumer paint business. He's responsible for understanding market forces, scaling laboratory formulation science to massive manufacturing, and supporting post-sales services. For Yeung and Valspar, learning plays a critical role throughout the R&D process. Yeung's approach to learning is to be flexible and open to new ideas - to move quickly and nimbly in order to serve a constantly changing market. He's a chemical engineer, leading a team of talented scientists, and he turns to top outside experts to fill in the gaps in his team's knowledge - immediately. When Yeung talks to experts, he often asks them, "What are the right questions to ask?" or "What am I missing?" and lets what he hears guide his research path.

The piece that I love most about my job is the fact that I impact how people live their lives every day. Paint is very emotional. That's why I put color in people's lives, and there are different colors for different people.

We make paints and coatings, and so if it matters, whether it's from a protection standpoint, whether it's from an aesthetic standpoint, whether it's from a durability standpointEif it matters, we're on it.

From the standpoint of peer-to-peer learning, one of the things that I've come to realize, sort of at the early stages of that experience, was that we just had to change the pace at which we learn.

In traditional consulting firm projects, or in market research reports, you have a scope, you ask the questions that you wouldE You know what problem you want to solve.

To be able to access today an expert in area A, and then maybe we discover that it's really area B or market C that we needed to get into, well, through GLG we can actually do that pretty rapidly.

If you don't know about something it's even okay to say, "What questions should I ask so that I can begin to understand a field?"

I've had the luxury of going from market segment to market segment, technology area to technology area. That learning is one of the things that really motivates me and keeps me very excited.