Adapter’s Advantage Podcast: Episode 6 Featuring Tim Murray
Welcome to Adapter’s Advantage: Breakthrough Moments that Lead to Success. In this episode, CEO Tim Murray describes how his search for a new challenge led him from the automotive industry in Tennessee to the Kingdom of Bahrain.
Tim had an impressive career with ARC Automotive, where in his last role he was VP and CFO. After ten years in the industry, he was looking to jumpstart his career. But when he applied to a blind ad in The Economist, he never imagined that it would put his career into overdrive as CEO of Alba, one of the largest aluminum smelters in the world.
Murray moved his family from Knoxville to Bahrain and began to transform the company’s culture. But just as the company was reaping the benefits of his leadership, a total blackout at Alba’s facilities led to an explosion that severely damaged its largest production line. Hear how Murray shepherded the company through the most severe crisis in its history.
Episode 6: Putting Your Career into Overdrive | Tim Murray
Listen and subscribe today: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | TuneIn
“Your competitive advantage is your people. If you want good people to stay, you need to train and develop them.” — Tim Murray
About Tim Murray
Tim Murray, CEO of Cardinal Virtues Consulting, Inc. has over 20 years of executive leadership experience and has implemented many different types of change management programs. Tim was with Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) for 12 years, as CEO for the last seven. Under Tim’s leadership, Alba successfully executed the $3 billion Line 6 Project safely, on-time and significantly under budget.
Tim is credited with transforming Alba’s Safety culture and the implementation of the “Project Titan” cost improvement program which improved Alba’s bottom line over $300 million. Tim is an avid reader and has created many customized leadership workshops. He is also an adjunct professor at Susquehanna University where he teaches classes on the impact of CEO leadership.
From This Episode
Host Mark Magnacca: “What would you say was the biggest challenge you faced as an American CEO in Bahrain?”
Tim Murray: “Initially the biggest challenge was moving to a new country 6,000 miles from the United States with a different culture. The company is a giant company, with $2.7 billion in sales. It’s about 15% of the GDP of the country. The whole country knows who Alba is. It employs about 4,000 people. I was coming from a plant of, say, six to seven hundred people. That was a big shift.
“When I got promoted to CEO, I had been there five years. I was still relatively young. When you go overseas, your ability to accelerate your career is much faster. To become CEO at age 41 of a $2.7 billion company would never happen here. Maybe in technology, but definitely not in heavy industry. You get opportunities you probably wouldn’t get in the United States much earlier in your career.
“The biggest challenge at the time was that we weren’t making a lot of money. Metal prices were low. We had bad safety performance. We were having a lot of injuries and fatalities, very horrible things So that was my number one objective. That was a very big challenge when I first started to get safety back on track.”
About Adapter’s Advantage
Our podcast features leaders from sales, training, and industry who share their personal journeys of transformation and how they are adapting to an ever-changing environment. Your host Mark Magnacca will introduce you to some of the most interesting and inspiring people he’s met over the last twenty years.
The conversions dive into the ups and downs of their journey. Our guests focus on inflection points—the aha moments that, in retrospect, had a critical impact on their success. These interviews will leave you with practical, real-world advice that you can apply to your life.
Our world is in constant change. The podcast helps sales training, enablement, or learning and development professionals gain valuable insights to help themselves and their organizations adapt to this time of tremendous upheaval.
Subscribe Today
Don’t miss an episode! Listen and subscribe today: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | TuneIn
