Eye on the ball.

Ward J. "Tim" Timken, chairman of Canton, Ohio-based Timken Co., once got a major dose of brand affirmation by pulling into a Kansas filling station. When the gas station attendant recognized the name on Timken's credit card, he disappeared into the back of the garage to retrieve a greasy bearing. "He slapped it down in front of me and said, 'I just pulled that off the back end of my pickup truck. I could have put it right back in there and it would have run for another 200,000 miles!'" recounts Timken.

As the fifth chairman of the $5.2 billion friction management and power transmission solutions company that his family took public in the 1920s, Timken continues to follow a business credo set by his great-great-grandfather: "If it's got the Timken brand on it, it will do exactly what we said it would." Yet, a great deal else about Timken Co. has changed dramatically since Henry Timken founded the company to manufacture the tapered roller bearing he invented in 1899--and most of that change took place over the past decade.

"Six years ago when we had a new management team coming in, we looked at the market potential of selling tapered roll bearings and steel and we said, 'It's not good enough,'" explains Timkens, who notes that at the time, the industry overall was struggling through a period of dampened demand and consolidation. "We stepped back and said, "'What are we really good at that we can create value doing?'"

The answer? Managing friction and transmitting power--in other words, the knowledge behind the bearings and steel products Timken Co. was best known for producing rather than simply the products themselves. "We've been making bearings for more than 100 years, and steel for 80," says Timken. "Marry those two together and we're uniquely positioned to understand what happens to that bearing inside of your application--whether that's wind energy, an airplane or a rolling mill--because we touch all of those industries and have done so for an awfully long time."

That expanded view of its role in the marketplace led to a transformation period for the company, which began to make inroads into new industrial markets, expand globally and make productivity improvements, as well as pursue strategic acquisitions (most recently Boring Specialties in February and The Purdy Corp. in 2007) and divestitures. "Investing for the long term by driving productivity, investing in technology, knowing what we're good at and not getting into things we're not good at is how we've been able to put together year-over-year growth and improvement," notes Timkin, who reports that over the past decade energy consumption per ton of steel produced has dropped by 35 percent.

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At the same time, infrastructure buildouts in emerging economies of China and India have been driving an increase in demand within the aerospace, oil and gas, and mining sectors that Timken Co. and competitors like Sweden's SKF and Germany's Schaeffler Group service. In fact, Timken Co.'s own international sales have doubled, jumping from 15 to 30 percent over the past 10 years.

"There's a fundamental shortage of capacity around the world right now," says Timken, who shrugs off the suggestion that the company could suffer a setback due to the looming threat of a U.S. recession. "Everybody's broad-brushing industries with this subprime crisis, but it's not fact-based. As long as we continue to see 10 to 12 percent growth in China and an increasing growth rate in India, things will remain relatively firm."

In fact, over the next five years, Timken expects the pace of international growth to intensify. "If you're not growing at 20 to 25 percent in Asia, you're doing something wrong," he says. "I expect 45 percent of our sales to be coming from outside the U.S. within five years. An economy is being created before our very eyes, and a lot of what we do enables that growth. We provide the bearings that make the steel mills and concrete plants run and the wind energy work. That's what we're all about."