Set clear goals
Up until the early 1980s, The Timken Co. had a business
model in place that drove the company to be the world leader
in tapered roller bearings and alloyed steel. Throughout that
decade, The Timken Co. began to look beyond its core business. The company purchased a few small operations and
pushed the boundaries around its core products but hadn’t made any drastic moves.
In the late ’90s, many of the company’s leaders were retiring.
As the new chairman, Tim Timken and the rest of the new generation of leaders had a new direction for the company. The
group re-evaluated what exactly the Timken brand stands for,
and they decided it wasn’t just about the products — it was the
knowledge behind those products that made The Timken Co.
the industry leader that it is.
That realization set the stage for new geographic opportunities — and risks — as Timken expands the playing field.
“As we get larger, the bets get bigger, and the consequences
of betting badly get bigger,” Timken says.
The process of adapting a company to global expansion
starts with a vision. For Timken, the new vision created some
momentous changes.
“It’s put us into parts of the market that we never would have
thought about serving before,” Timken says. “It drives us to
take products to market that don’t look a whole lot like a
tapered roller bearing.”
The key to executing your vision on a worldwide scale is creating a communication structure that allows you to have
instant contact with both the global management team and the
global work force. Quick, precise communication lets you be
both proactive and reactive to changes in the environment
around you.
“It all starts with the strategy work you do to position your
company, and then it cascades down from there,” he says.
“Once you get your vision and mission for the company set,
you define the strategy. You go from strategy into tactics, from
tactics into business plans, business plans into individual performance plans.
“Throughout the whole communication chain, you have to
make sure you are staying true to a core set of directions
you’ve put in place for the company. If you do that well, the
communications become a lot easier.”
Timken wants to make sure that every one of the company’s
25,000 employees knows exactly what role he or she plays in
getting The Timken Co. to reach its goals. The strategies are
translated directly to each individual so that everyone knows
what he or she is supposed to do.
“They’re compensated on it through the metrics that we use
in our compensation plans,” Timken says. “Ultimately, all of
those will link back to the strategy and the vision for the company.
“We have annual compensation plans that have hard and soft
metrics tied to them. Beyond the pure financial metrics, there
are other ones that relate to quality, safety, environmental performance and penetration growth in certain geographies. It’s
nothing all that fancy, but they’re all derived from the strategy
we are trying to drive through the business.”
Of the employees who have been through the vision-training
process, 98 percent of them were able to not only recite the company’s vision, but they were also able to explain what it meant and
how it related to their jobs.