WELDING JOURNAL 39 me the value of hard work and of developing personal relationships. He showed me that if you worked hard, treated people fairly, and developed good networks, you could succeed in any walk of life. My first boss was a gentleman named Roy Martin. It was really my first exposure working for somebody who had a long professional career. He helped to shape the early elements of my business philosophy, driven around the Lincoln business philosophy and a strong sense of business ethics. I would say there were three individuals later in my career, starting with Don Hastings, who hired me and also served as our chairman and chief executive officer; Fred Mackenbach, who was president of our U.S. company; and Paul Beddia, who was our vice president of sales and who gave me my first management role in Columbus. Each of them were Lincoln Electric career veterans — they’d started and finished their careers at Lincoln, a great model to follow. They all had a common element to their business philosophy, but they also all had different ideas and philosophies. As I’ve said to many people that I’ve worked with over the years, you need to learn from every person you come into contact with, and you should be able to take the good things that they do and decide whether they will work for you and discard those elements that won’t fit your ideals or style. You shouldn’t try to copy any single individual; instead, shape your own business philosophy around the success of others, but have a sense of independence and creativity in developing your own ideas. Do you have a particular business philosophy? Please provide a brief explanation. John C. and James F. Lincoln were the driving force behind the growth of the company and the development of a management philosophy. They had two very important business philosophies. The first was they believed the company needed to have a constant focus on the customer, and that if we did everything we could do to make our customers successful, then the other two stakeholders in the company, the employees and the shareholders, would also be rewarded. The fact that I spent the early stages of my career in the sales organization really allowed me to hone that philosophy and to live by it. I worked very hard in every role I had with Lincoln Electric to be sure the decisions I made or that we made were the right decisions for our customers, and in doing so, I think our employees and shareholders have been really rewarded. James F. Lincoln also developed the business philosophy — and it’s the model that drives the organization today — that “the actual is limited, but the possible is immense.” If you walk into our corporate headquarters today, you’ll see that banner over the entryway of the company and it’s been there since the factory was built back in the early 1950s. That philosophy really drives people, myself included, to recognize that we can’t do everything, but we can do many things, and if we take advantage of all the opportunities that are there for us and really focus on going the extra mile to serve the customer, then we’re going to be very successful and we’re going to outpace the competition by a wide margin, and I think we’ve demonstrated that for more than 115 years. What traits do you think are important for an executive to possess in order to be successful and why? It’s a cliché but I truly believe it: You have to lead by example. I would never ask somebody to do something I wouldn’t do or haven’t done myself. If you are passing down specific actions or responsibilities, you have to be prepared to do the same things, or you should have done the same things as part of your career. I also believe it’s important to get as much information as possible first hand. When I took over the responsibilities as president of the Cleveland company, I had zero manufacturing experience. I’d been on a lot of shop floors visiting customers but I didn’t know anything about the elements of making a shop floor work, so I spent a lot of time out walking the shop floor and talking to as many people as I could find to talk to, to get their ideas and impressions, either good, bad, or ugly. That input from managers and shop-floor personnel helped me make day-to-day decisions and shape our strategy long term. I had the same philosophy as far as customers were concerned. (Stropki added that he spent a lot of time face to face talking and listening to customers to find out what the company could do to make them more succesSful.) What do you believe have been some of your greatest accomplishments during your years as head of the company? This is not about me, it’s about “we.” It is really what the management team and the 10,000-plus employees of the company have been able to accomplish during my tenure. There’s no one individual in any company that can accomplish what we have accomplished over the past ten years by himself. We have a great management team and an unbelievable workforce that is really committed to a common objective, our 2020 Vision. If you look at the company today, clearly the thing that has differentiated us over the past ten years and brought our tremendous success has been a commitment to our international expansion efforts. In the early 1990s, we had four factories in four countries. Today, we have 45 factories and are producing welding products in 19 countries around the world. If we had focused just on staying a U.S. company, we would have been subject to the GDP fluctuations within the U.S. economy over the past many years, and would have never really had a chance to capture the growth, and more importantly, to service our U.S. customers that were also globalizing in places such as China, India, Brazil, and Russia. So I would say that would be the number-one theme. Secondly, we’ve built an exceptionally strong global management team here. Going back 20 years, we had a very experienced North American team, but the issues we faced and the opportunities we had around the world were much different. Building a team that had international business experience and the appetite to accept the risks and challenges associated with growth opportunities on an international footprint clearly drove the great success we’ve had. Lastly, we have maintained our commitment to Cleveland and to our Cleveland company. Our Cleveland operation is still our largest and most profitable business, we employ the largest number of people here in Cleveland, and we’ve taken a factory that over the years had been underinvested in, and these past ten-plus years we have substantially upgraded it into a world-class, globally competitive manufacturing facility by investing in new machine tools, by employing new business processes like Six Sigma and lean manufacturing, by focusing on our environmental, health, and safety elements, and by creating a safe workplace and a strong, positive attitude within the workforce. What is the biggest change you’ve seen in manufacturing and/or welding during your tenure at Lincoln? Globalization is the number one change. Had we stayed as a strictly North American-focused business, I think we would have had a much different result and face a much different future. By reaching out globally, we’ve faced new competitors and experienced many new opportunities, and it has given us the ability to respond to the strength of some of
Welding Journal | February 2014
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