About Connie
An operations leader
who owns safety.
Not the other way around. Two decades. Three reactors. Two mergers. One hurricane. Chemical Engineer. MBA. The kind of background that earns a different conversation.
Not the other way around. Two decades. Three reactors. Two mergers. One hurricane. Chemical Engineer. MBA. The kind of background that earns a different conversation.
Connie Buskness is an executive leader who guides manufacturing organizations through growth, transformation, and risk — from commodity polymers to specialty and custom chemistry. She has built plants from the ground up, owned full P&L, integrated two corporate mergers, and turned underperforming operations into reliable ones.
One conviction runs through all of it: safety and business performance are the same system. You can't fix one without the other — she's spent her career proving it. Lately that means putting AI to work across tens of thousands of records to make the signals visible fast enough to act on. Technology is a tool for better decisions, never a substitute for judgment.
She holds a Chemical Engineering degree from Texas A&M and an MBA from Pepperdine. She oversees EHS Environmental & Process Safety Improvement across 50+ sites in the Americas, serves on industry and community boards, and enjoys working with universities and educators to develop the next generation of manufacturing leaders.
My husband and I both grew up with deep roots — same house, same city, same community. Then our careers moved us. Redondo Beach. Dallas. Houston. Mobile, Alabama. Every move meant building a new village from scratch.
We decided early: if we were going to be nomads, we were going to be adventurers. That meant our daughters grew up knowing how to walk into a room where they didn't know anyone, introduce themselves, and find their people. Having a sister meant they were never doing it alone — their best friend was always in the next room.
That foundation paid off in ways I couldn't have planned. Both are now in college — University of Alabama and University of South Carolina — and both went through sorority rush. I'll be honest: I was nervous. Rush is intense. But watching the process, I was genuinely impressed. It's structured, intentional, and built around meeting people, service, and stepping into leadership. Exactly the things we'd been practicing their whole lives.
They are leaders. Problem solvers. They walk into new rooms with confidence and curiosity. I could not be more proud of who they are becoming.
When I'm not working, I'm traveling — beaches in summer, ski slopes in winter. And lately, a lot of my time is going to Pinot, our new boxador puppy. She's made me more disciplined than any management system I've ever implemented. New puppy schedules are no joke.
My husband and I are both Texas A&M Aggies. Football season gets complicated when the girls play each other. We love it anyway.
The greenfield build, the Dow turnaround, full P&L, two mergers and a JV, and putting AI to work across 50,000+ records — with the full toolkit behind them.
See the full track record →Two mergers. One hurricane. Hundreds of incident investigations.
Where safety goes, the business goes. If your safety performance is erratic, I guarantee your production consistency is too. They are the same system.
We are over-tooling and under-training. Tools support judgment. They do not replace it. If an engineer completes an MOC but doesn't understand what the change does to the physics, you've digitized a bad decision.
You don't rise to the level of your procedures. You fall to the level of your preparation. Compliance creates consistency. Capability creates resilience. Learning creates prevention.
