Published December 3, 2007

Business person of the year 2007
By Michelle Long

Curious business folk may wonder what sets Ted Melnik apart from the region's pre-existing pool of over-the-top business execs-those who remain successfully accomplished in the standard fare of balanced scorecard performance measures. Not to mention, those meeting benchmarks currently in vogue, like promoting social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and let's not forget, creating and maintaining an ethical corporate culture, having successfully gotten out of the proverbial black box only to jump right back in-Six Sigma standards and all.

Former Sybron CEO and native New Yorker Melnik is not your typical textbook case in leadership innovation. In his six short years as president of the Roanoke County-based Novozymes Biologicals, after it acquired Sybron back in 2001, he has more than covered the bases in the environmental sustainability arena. As head of the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Danish firm Novozymes A.S. based just outside Copenhagen, Melnik is in the business of green. The whole product platform is seeded in developing useful products using naturally occurring microorganisms. Biomedical applications involve the use of microorganisms for soil in a remediation of waste and soil, and the use of microorganisms in wastewater treatment plants to help them run better, Melnik says. Part of the business is replacing chemistry with microbiology, which replaces chemical pesticides with microorganisms in agricultural fields.

Finding natural ways to do the same things that chemistry does involves products like fungi that work as an insecticide and bacteria that prevent disease. Commendable, yes. But not enough to win him the coveted title of this year's Blue Ridge Business Journal Business Person of the Year. Perhaps he went looking for the recognition? Not likely, gauging from the rhetorical response Melnik utters after hearing the news that he'd been chosen Business Person of the Year. It went something like, "Well, why'd you do that?" A moment of shared laughter sobers him to the reality-his struggles with impatience aside-that this obvious inconvenience is, well, part of his job. Part cheerleader, part strategist and part translator, and mostly the place where the buck stops, he says. Despite having to prepare for a weeklong trip to newly acquired Philom, a Canadian firm, he accommodates, "Well what do I need to do?" As if being responsible for the corporation's global operations is not enough.

Global presence

Novozymes Biologicals headquarters and research development are based in Roanoke County. Manufacturing operations are in Salem. Global operations extend into Asia, Europe and India. Melnik says, "I'm all over the place and that can be literally and figuratively." Three trips to China this year alone to meet with his team there was "not that bad." But getting to a remote part of India to check on R&D operations there-"that's the tough one." Dealing with an emerging economy like China's is not so much of a problem, says Melnik. Novozymes has manufacturing facilities located there. He just worries over getting paid mostly and, of course, dealing with the non-existent intellectual property rights where trade secrets remain just that. "We're not much in Africa and South America," he adds, almost apologetically as if being in 75 to 100 different countries isn't enough. Perhaps it's that self-proclaimed impatience he struggles with: "I go home and then the next day I come in and say, 'Well, why isn't it done yet?'"

Unusual is the frankness in admitting weaknesses. One of which is a propensity toward distraction. Even though he says he can multitask pretty well, Melnik admits to occasionally "spreading it a little too thin." Unique also in an age of zero defects and short-term financials is his tolerance for mistakes. Assuming, of course that you've gotten the right people in the right job. He says, "First of all, we don't perform brain surgery here . . . if we make a mistake, no one's going to die. So it's fine, OK, we missed this one . . . we'll learn from it. Let's go from here and celebrate the successes." That's where the "Zymies" and Zymation awards come in-as a way to recognize individual and team accomplishment. "The point is that people tend to be hard on themselves for things that don't go right . . . in accepting mistakes and learning from them, you had also better be doing a good job celebrating all the things you do right," he states emphatically. Social responsibility Novozymes has a triple bottom line, which means the company is measured on financials as well as "environmentals." And then there's the social responsibility aspect. Part of the metrics involves creating projects that are better for the environment and that entails making both the work environment and the outside environment better, Melnik says.

Contributions to the community include helping the Salem Food Bank with projects like the Annual Turkey Drive and pledging $250,000 over the next five years to helping develop the 32-mile Roanoke River Greenway. The continuous hiking and biking trail along the Roanoke River will ultimately extend the entire width of the Roanoke Valley-something a whole spectrum of the demographic population can use, Melnik says. "What I love about it is you are building an asset on the river and once you build that asset, it doesn't cost you millions of dollars to maintain . . . What was a hidden liability starts to become more and more of an open asset." The contribution was done in part to retain knowledge workers and to get other companies involved-not just financially, he says, but in helping the local governments make it a higher priority. Getting it built remains a challenge. Maintaining a better work environment involves adhering to the parent company's "Ten Management Fundamentals" or guiding principles. Danish company rules to live by include maintaining a good work environment, promoting teamwork, fostering communication and managerial responsibilities like "developing your people."

Ethics

Regular audits once every two years insure that the company is living up to those standards. What that amounts to, Melnik says, is that external auditors come in and interview 20 percent of the workforce. After a week, they provide Melnik and his managers with a report card, indicating what they are doing well and areas that need improvement. He's given 12 months "to go fix it, to establish an action plan." Welcoming the opportunity as "very good," Melnik says he's proud to work for a company like Novozymes: "They say this is what we live by and we're going to audit you every two years to see how you're doing." Still wondering what Melnik has that sets him apart, other than the obvious set of self-admitted strengths like being a good communicator and a good strategist-important components in managing a company of 250 people in the global business arena? A chance reading of First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham motivated Melnik last year to refocus the company's individual development programs. He's augmenting strengths, rather that developing plans for fixing people's weaknesses, as has been standard practice in HR for the past 30 years, despite its futility.

A management team of five "really good people," plus Melnik, makes many of the company's decisions but sometimes he says, "It's my decision . a lot of it comes back to gut. Making those decisions, you've got to develop a gut feel and that takes a lot of time. But [knowing] when to take gut feelings to the next level, you have to have gone through certain experiences. And really what you've experienced is failure, because you learn so much from the mistakes that you've made." In new product development, Melnik says, eight out of 10 of the products fail. "You've gotta realize that. Don't be worried about going after it. "You gotta not be afraid to make decisions. As companies grow they become bureaucratic, cautious. They study things to death. That really inhibits growth. So you have to have the guts to make the hard decisions and you've got to live with the mistakes," he says. Realizing this has helped him develop a gut feel that has taken the company through six acquisitions in six years.

Ted Melnik, Blue Ridge Business Journal's Business Person of the Year . . . any questions?

This article is courtesy of the Blue Ridge Business Journal and Michelle Baron Long who is a Pilot-based freelance writer.