Business professionals from organizations of all types and sizes hold some amount of power, but how you shape the economy and community is when you are truly influential.
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Saint-Gobain wasn’t using all of its massive campus in Worcester, so the head of the facility – Patrick Dwyer – transferred 51 acres to the Worcester Business Development Corp., helping the abrasives manufacturer right-size its campus and providing WBDC an opportunity to implement a community revitalization plan, calling for 1 million square feet of new manufacturing space.
As the leader of Saint-Gobain facilities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Dwyer already had plenty of power. By giving the land to WBDC, Dwyer used that power to have significant influence on the Central Massachusetts economy and community.
This way of using power to have outsized influence on the region’s business community is at the heart of WBJ’s Power 50 list every year. Business professionals from organizations of all types and sizes hold some amount of power, but how you shape the economy and community is when you are truly influential. You could sit atop the largest employer in the region with billions of dollars in revenue, like Dr. Eric Dickson at UMass Memorial Health, and play a significant role inside and outside of your industry. Or you could be a single person on a mission, like Ivette Olmeda as the Transformative Development Initiative fellow for Worcester’s Pleasant Street, and have an outsized influence in improving an economically depressed neighborhood.
The Power 50 is our annual list of the most influential professionals in the Central Massachusetts business community, where we in the WBJ newsroom tell the story of how power is shared and used in the region, as told through the people wielding it most effectively. In this comprehensive list, we strive to inform you where power truly lies in the region’s economy while still providing new names and stories year after year. In order for someone to be listed in the Power 50 for two years in a row, we apply a higher standard where that person must have used their power to have outsized influence in a new way the second year.
You’ll see many of the power players who’ve been featured previously, including 17 who met the higher standard and repeated from the 2022 list. Still, you’ll find an additional 22 professionals who’ve never been in the Power 50, showcasing how new people are rising to power and using their influence in different ways. It’s a fascinating dynamic.
Read all the 2023 Power 50 profiles here.
Check out every Central Mass. professional who has ever been listed on a WBJ Power list here.
