— Tim Smith, ’16
The overarching ideas of servant leadership and the triple bottom line have certainly morphed and molded my approach to managing my current organization. The time I spent in the Collaborative MBA program highlights and keeps these ideals in the forefront of my mind when creating our future strategies. I chose the Collaborative MBA program, not only for its concentration on these ideals, but also the hard skills—the nuts and bolts, step-by-step administrative frameworks—to successfully grow and maintain a thriving business.
In a Collaborative MBA finance course, Dr. Jason Swartzlander introduced the Balanced Scorecard approach created by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. The Balanced Scorecard requires you to create measurable initiatives that are derived from your overall organizational vision. The initiatives are organized under four main categories: financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth. All initiatives under the three latter categories must tie back into and contribute to the financial goals—creating an interconnected organizational strategy. This was the “nuts and bolts” recipe I was looking for, so I tucked it into my back pocket—knowing I’d use this framework again in the future.
A month after graduation in 2016, I accepted a position as Vice President of HIBLOW USA—an opportunity that would not have been offered to me without the completion of my MBA. HIBLOW USA is the North American sales and distribution subsidiary of Techno Takatsuki Company (TTC), headquartered in Osaka, Japan. TTC designs and manufactures air pumps for a wide variety of applications including: wastewater treatment, medical devices, laboratory equipment, aquaculture, and hydrogen fuel cells. Our North American business not only supports the local facilities and Japanese headquarters, but hundreds of much-desired production jobs in the Philippines as well.
In the fall of 2017, I was scheduled to present the annual strategy for HIBLOW USA to the global management team in Japan. Historically, our North American strategy was built upon a number of independent—and usually unrelated—tasks for a few of the largest customers. It was time to implement a strategy that pulled in every aspect of the organization, not solely customer and product focused tasks. So, I pulled out my materials from Dr. Swartzlander’s course and got to work.
I was able to include initiatives for IT hardware and software updates, continuing education for employees, modes of end-user engagement, a recycling program for scrapped parts, and new product launches—all tied back to the financial measures for the year. After I fleshed out the framework for the Balanced Scorecard, I then created a presentation to explain this approach to business managers that speak little English and have a much different business culture.
Without interruption and only nodding acknowledgement during my presentation, which is the respectful Japanese way, I could only assume my international colleagues grasped both the framework and the individual initiatives. Much to my surprise, a few board members told me at dinner that night they had also used the Balanced Scorecard for multi-year planning in the past. That kicked off a fantastic group discussion of the pros and cons of various strategy frameworks that originated in both the US and Japan—those created by Kazuo Inamori at Kyocera and Japan airlines and the Toyota Production System.
Overall, the Balanced Scorecard process has allowed HIBLOW USA to grow from a financially successful business, into a fully developed organization. The strategy framework allows for a more holistic management perspective, versus a sum of the parts outlook. This system will continue to be at the core of HIBLOW USA’s expansion throughout the next five years.
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Tim, this is Missy. Thanks for sharing this story!