CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE - Key Persons
Bob Nosal earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from the Wake Forest Babcock Graduate School of Management's Executive Program. Bob's global career within the specialty chemical and materials industries has been based on the principles of building and resourcing people, systems, and processes and capabilities needed to execute strategic plans that relied on innovative value adding new products to drive sustainable profitable growth. He also developed constant improvement mindsets to drive out complacency and strived to drive constructive change.
As a business manager, global general manager, CEO and board member, Bob's direct experience covers operations, business, and process and strategy development. The businesses he managed ranged in size from $50M to over $750M in annual revenues. His businesses built a reputation of regional and global collaboration enabling delivery of aggressive profitable growth in all business environments and global regions. His businesses also utilized key market insight that drove development and commercialization of value-added new products.
Bob was a constant change agent to set the right culture and challenged his teams to move aster and smarter than competition. Bob invested in the development of knowledge workers, giving his teams the ability to move more quickly than their competition by regularly learning from changing market realities and from what they did well and where they needed improvement.
Jim Hlavacek, PhD has over 40 years of global experience as a businessman, strategy consultant, and management educator. Dr. Hlavacek has earned an international reputation and is considered to be a thought leader in new-product development and industrial marketing. He wrote six books and over 40 practical articles in many management magazines, including five for the Harvard Business Review.
He has been a board member of both Fortune 300 companies and successful startups. He was the first independent outside director on the Nucor board where he served for 20 years. He also served for many years on the Board of Directors of Pneutronics, LDI, Hargraves Technologies, Mueller Systems, Xtek, Madison Electric, and several venture capital startups.
Dr. Hlavacek is the past vice president and director of the American Marketing Association. He was chairman of the marketing department at Case Western Reserve University and the Director of the Institute for Executive Education at Wake Forest University's Graduate School of Management. He has conducted management development programs at many universities, including Cornell, Columbia, Penn State, Stanford, Wisconsin, The London Business School and Tokyo University.
He has developed and presented over 1,500 in-house executive programs on innovation and growth around the globe. About half of his innovation and organic growth workshops are conducted with business teams outside of North America. Major long-term management development clients include Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works®, Unilever, Cabot, Caterpillar, Timken, 3M, Illinois Tool Works, S.C. Johnson, Henkel Loctite, and BASF.
His educational background includes a B.S. from Southern Illinois University, an MBA in Industrial Management from Louisiana Tech, and a PhD in Business to Business Marketing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Jim is a frequent speaker and workshop leader at national and global company meetings. Of the six books he authored, best-sellers include Market Driven Management, co-authored with B. Charles Ames, and Profitable Top-Line Growth for Industrial Companies.
Jim and his wife, Ursula, reside in Charlotte, North Carolina and DeBordieu Colony, Georgetown, South Carolina with their two golden retrievers. They have three grown children.
Bob first met Dr. Hlavacek thirty-four years ago when he was a student at Wake Forest University in the Executive MBA Program; Jim was his professor there and they remained in regular contact afterwards as Bob engaged Jim as a sounding board on initiatives and challenges that he faced in his businesses. Along the way, National Starch (then owned by Unilever) began utilizing Dr. Hlavacek for organizational development and Bob utilized his training programs for many in his group. Because of the importance Bob placed on people development and market-focused results, he utilized Dr. Hlavacek's programs for development of his global businesses after leaving National Starch.