Cover Story

Rolling along

By Matt McClellan

The Timken file

Ward J. “Tim” Timken Jr. sees his name on every product his company manufactures, every contract the company signs and every business card handed out by one of his 25,000 employees. That’s why he always keeps in mind something his great-great-grandfather said: “Don’t ever put your name on something you’d ever have cause to be ashamed of.”

Tim Timken is the fifth chairman of the family-run, $4.9 billion manufacturer of anti-friction bearings and other steel products. Although the company has been publicly traded since the 1920s, The Timken Co. has managed to retain an atmosphere in which employees value the Timken brand like they were members of the tightly knit Timken family themselves.

“They say if you cut one of our people, they bleed black and orange — our company colors,” Timken says. “People understand that when they come to work for The Timken Co. they’re representing me, my name, my family’s name and the other 24,999 people that work for the company.”

Taking pride in your products results in higher quality, but even the best product will fail unless it’s part of a well-executed strategy. Timken has set the course for the company — a course that embraces change and the global economy.

“The key difference today, from a business perspective, is that we are acting more global,” Timken says. “We have manufacturing outside the U.S. and that has forced us to do a couple of things. One, the world is a heck of a lot smaller place than it was even 10 years ago. So from a speed point of view, decisions are made quicker, competitors react quicker and financial instability spreads quicker. So as a business, we have to be positioned to react quicker. That’s one of the key attributes for a global business today.”

The other key difference is complexity. Taking on the world isn’t easy.

“The fact of the matter is that we run a heck of a lot more complex business today than we did even 10 years ago — from a manufacturing footprint point of view, from a currency exposure point of view, from the number of customers — we are a lot more complex. We used to be a smaller, more North-America-driven type of company.”

Competing globally means being willing to make tough decisions. The Timken Co. has exited some markets and strengthened others through strategic acquisitions. The results have shown up on the balance sheet: In 2006, net income per diluted share was $2.36, among the highest in the company’s history, and sales were up while debt was down.

Here’s how Tim Timken expanded the horizons of a 108-year-old company to face the reality of a global economy.