Four walls and a roof. They’re the essential ingredients of any freestanding structure worth its salt. Beyond that, your mileage may vary. And since variety is the spice of life, there are plenty of ways to turn a simple building into a purpose-built architectural masterpiece.

Architects, designers and contractors looking to elevate a project have long turned to Armstrong World Industries for help. One of North America’s leading providers of innovative interior and exterior architectural fitouts such as specialty walls, custom acoustics, sustainable materials and much more, Armstrong understands functional needs and imaginative innovation.

An enduring legacy

Both can be found in the firm’s rich portfolio and product range. But it’s Armstrong’s longevity that sets it apart from the competition. The company has been around for more than 165 years, and much of that has been spent in a strong market position.

For the Armstrong team, and particularly for outgoing President and CEO Victor Grizzle, work is a passion project.

“I’m a big believer in the power of focus, and we prove that here at Armstrong,” he tells The CEO Magazine.

In fact, Grizzle is still proving that; his next port of call after his dual roles at the head of Armstrong is none other than the company’s Executive Chair. The transition period, he says, has offered some interesting moments of reflection.

“When I arrived at Armstrong, we were in a very good profitability spot, but the fact of it is, we just didn’t grow,” he admits.

When the cash flow is strong and consistent and the bottom line looks good, it can be hard to notice stagnation, but Grizzle says identifying the opportunity for change was a turning point in his leadership.

“The big work really started when we had to come up with a bold aspiration we could all rally around to instigate change,” he says.

“When a leader doesn’t have an obvious burning platform to get the desired change you have to create one. But what you have to create is a bold aspiration everyone can buy into. If you can do that, you not only win their heads, you win their hearts.”

Looking back, Grizzle feels addressing this challenge transformed Armstrong.

“We’ve done some extraordinary things,” he acknowledges.

International experience

A veteran of GE and Valmont Industries, Grizzle spent a good part of his early career building businesses overseas.

“I lived in Asia twice, I lived in Europe, and so I developed a global brain,” he says. “Even at Valmont, I lived in Omaha, Nebraska, but most of my business was outside the United States. It was mostly international.”

His success abroad allowed him to build capabilities he may not have done at home. When the opportunity came to join Armstrong, it was time to flex those muscles.

“When I arrived at Armstrong, they wanted to grow internationally. That naturally fit my strengths very nicely,” he recalls.

After overseeing the construction of a plant in China and another in Russia, Grizzle set about building Armstrong’s presence in the Middle East. By 2016 however, it was becoming clear that the company’s international focus had left something lacking at home.

“The world had changed and our prospects for profitable growth had changed. In 2016 and 2017, it became really clear that we had to focus on the North American market,” he says. “We were thinking differently about the North American market and its growth potential, which we’d frankly neglected.

“But it was where we had the best returns, the best market position, the best cash flow generation and the strongest team. Why wouldn’t we invest our last dollar here versus trying to fix things overseas?”

It was an opportunity for Grizzle to apply his international mindset to a domestic situation. The power of focus was his opportunity.

“It generates the opportunity for you to be the best at something,” he reveals. “If you don’t focus, the best you can be is just as good as anybody else. If you do, you have the chance to be better than the rest and possibly the best in the world.”

Standing at a crossroads, Armstrong chose to focus the business on the Americas where it had a leadership position in commercial ceilings and specialty walls.

“And now we’re the best in the world at what we do, and certainly the best in North America,” Grizzle says.

The 4,000-strong team is now entirely centered in the United States and Canada, and the company has grown its revenue from approximately US$840 million in 2016 to US$1.6 billion in 2025.

“When you look at our growth results, it reflects the power of focus on a bold aspiration and what it can generate,” he adds.

A solid future

Ironically, Armstrong’s stability became its greatest strength in the pursuit of that growth.

“We discovered research that said out of roughly 5,000 publicly traded companies, only eight percent were able to sustain growth for five consecutive years,” he says. “And it came down to two key attributes – being champions of stability and being a rapid adapter. It was the coexistence of what seemed to be paradoxical attributes that made them unique.”

As a 165-year-old company, Armstrong was already a champion of stability, with stable leadership teams and steady strategy, but it needed to work on its agility and ability to adapt quickly to market fluctuations.

“Organizations that are agile can move their capital allocation around quickly, make small bets and when they win, double down. We thought, ‘As a company, we could do this.’”

That became Armstrong’s bold aspiration: to become a growth outlier to do something very few companies have done, delivering at least five percent top-line growth for five consecutive years. Grizzle saw it as a way to instill a new vitality in the company.

“When you’re growing, it creates a vacuum that pulls people up into greater opportunities,” he says. “It also unlocks the value of the company; our stock went from US$40 when we started to nearly US$200 last week.”

The behavioral changes required internally weren’t easy to bring about. Culturally, things had to shift away from the status quo toward the expectation for growth, no matter what.

“I had to remind myself that you don’t get to last 165 years as a company if you’re not willing to adapt and change. There was already a DNA here receptive to change, and we had to tap into that.”

What Grizzle recognized was that until there’s a clearly defined aspiration or destination, nobody moves. The growth outlier goal became Armstrong’s burning platform.

“It’s a natural human survival instinct,” he says. “So it’s the responsibility of leadership to provide a very clear vision of what success looks like.”

The key was becoming very much market and customer-focused rather than looking for unfamiliar places and hoping to find growth there.

“We stayed focused on our core customers and asked ourselves ‘What else can we bring them that they’d like us to bring?’ That reduces risk when you do that, and it’s a great customer pull for innovation,” he reveals.

With the growth outlier aspiration in place and a strong understanding of how to operate with both stability and agility, Grizzle and his team had a means to mobilize the execution culture at Armstrong.

“We have a high degree of mutual respect for each other at Armstrong,” he says. “This is a team that wants to win and they’re disappointed when they don’t. They’re passionate, and as a first-time CEO I was very fortunate to find this culture was here for me to tap into.

“Once we began to embrace the growth mindset, we shifted from low single-digit top-line growth rates in 2016 to high single-digit growth rates and doubled our total addressable market.”

This wasn’t all smooth sailing, however.

“There are a lot of growing pains that come with that,” Grizzle notes. “You can imagine the pressure on the structure and the foundation. If you’re not all moving in the same direction, if you’re not aligned, you can get a lot of friction and what I call disenergy.

“But here, the culture was so fundamentally sound, and I’d say today, we have a good coexistence of the right attributes of stability and adaptation.”

And although Grizzle is leaving one leadership role for another, he says he’s departing knowing the company is sound.

“The foundational work is in place and we have a lot of momentum behind us. But you’ve got to be courageous, take the risks and create your own luck,” he advises.