“No business can sustainably grow faster than its people.”
Szabolcs Kiss is an international business leader, advisor, educator, and leadership development professional whose career spans more than 25 years across manufacturing, supply chain, procurement, operations, engineering, quality, continuous improvement, organizational development, and post-acquisition integration. His distinctive perspective combines decades of practical executive leadership with deep academic insight into human resources and organizational behavior. Throughout his career, he has focused on helping organizations navigate complexity, improve performance, strengthen leadership capability, and create sustainable enterprise value by aligning strategy, people, processes, and technology.
Much of Szabolcs’s executive career was developed at NI, formerly National Instruments, where he progressed through a succession of increasingly senior roles over more than two decades. His journey included responsibilities in materials management, planning, procurement, manufacturing operations, supply chain leadership, continuous improvement, quality, learning and development, global hardware services, acquisition integration, global procurement, and manufacturing operations. That progression gave him an unusually broad understanding of how the different components of an industrial enterprise interact, from customer demand and supplier relationships to production, engineering, talent development, service delivery, and financial performance.
As a senior global manufacturing executive, Szabolcs led complex operations across major manufacturing locations in Hungary and Malaysia, with responsibility for more than 700 employees and significant operating expenditures. Under his leadership, organizations improved customer delivery, planning performance, quality, workforce flexibility, employee engagement, and continuous improvement participation. His teams achieved on-time delivery above 95 percent, raised plan attainment substantially, reduced scrap to below 0.1 percent, shortened aging work-in-process and reject queues, and generated more than $1.5 million in annual continuous-improvement savings and cost avoidance. These results reflect his ability to translate strategy into disciplined execution while simultaneously building a culture in which employees are encouraged to contribute ideas, solve problems, and take ownership of performance.
Szabolcs also brings substantial global procurement and supply chain expertise. As Senior Director of Global Procurement, he led direct, indirect, project procurement, and procurement engineering organizations across the United States, Malaysia, Costa Rica, and Hungary, overseeing approximately $800 million in direct spend and another $800 million in indirect spend. During this period, his organization reduced critical shortages by 80 percent, lowered end-of-quarter revenue risk from more than $173 million to less than $2 million, improved supplier and payment-term performance, and reduced inventory by approximately $20 million. His career also includes leadership of planning, procurement, supplier quality, warehousing, logistics, and regional supply chain development, including establishing supply chain infrastructure for a major manufacturing operation in Penang, Malaysia.
Transformation and integration have been recurring themes throughout Szabolcs’s career. As Senior Director of Acquisition Manufacturing Integration, he held leadership responsibility for manufacturing and supply chain activities at a newly acquired operation in California while serving as a global acquisition program manager for multiple integration workstreams. His responsibilities included coordinating the manufacturing and supply chain integration of acquired businesses and transferring five types of highly complex, high-power battery test systems from the United States to Hungary. This work strengthened his ability to evaluate businesses holistically, identify operational and organizational risks, integrate teams across cultures, protect customer commitments, and create value during periods of significant structural change.
His leadership experience extends beyond traditional manufacturing and supply chain functions. Szabolcs led global hardware services operations across Hungary, Malaysia, China, and the United States, overseeing repair, replacement, calibration, and factory installation services. During his leadership, repair turnaround time fell from more than 30 days to approximately 10 days, calibration turnaround was reduced from more than 15 days to approximately two days depending on service level, and factory installation lead times fell from roughly two weeks to under 48 hours. Production and service on-time delivery improved from below 60 percent to above 95 percent. His ability to improve performance across both product- and service-oriented environments demonstrates a disciplined approach to process improvement that remains grounded in customer value.
What further distinguishes Szabolcs is his commitment to developing people alongside systems and processes. Earlier in his leadership career, he combined responsibility for continuous improvement and manufacturing quality with global learning and development for approximately 1,500 employees across technician, individual contributor, support, and management populations. Over the years, he has designed and led numerous professional and leadership development programs internationally and has developed talent across multiple countries and cultures. His experience as a leadership coach, facilitator, and organizational development professional allows him to approach transformation not simply as an operational exercise, but as a change in mindset, behavior, capability, and organizational culture.
Szabolcs has complemented his business career with substantial academic achievement. He holds an engineering management degree, a finance degree, a Diploma in Management Studies, an MBA, and a PhD in Human Resources and Organizational Behaviour. He serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Debrecen and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the United Kingdom. His academic work and publications have examined subjects including workplace selection preferences, organizational development, talent, and change management. This combination of practitioner and scholar enables him to connect evidence-based thinking with the realities of leading organizations, making complex decisions, managing tradeoffs, and delivering measurable results.
His professional qualifications further reflect the breadth of his career. Szabolcs has earned credentials in executive coaching and mentoring, supply chain management, procurement, project management, training facilitation, and internal auditing. His areas of expertise include lean manufacturing, continuous improvement, operational excellence, supply chain management, manufacturing, engineering management, project management, change management, automation, inventory management, and cross-functional team leadership. His LinkedIn skills profile reinforces the depth of this experience across manufacturing, supply chain, lean, continuous improvement, and operational leadership.
Today, Szabolcs continues to bridge business leadership, consulting, education, and executive development. As a trainer, learning and development consultant, and leadership coach associated with FranklinCovey, he works with individuals and organizations to strengthen leadership effectiveness, trust, execution, and sustainable behavioral change. He has been recognized by FranklinCovey for client satisfaction and business impact, while his current academic role allows him to continue developing future generations of leaders. His work reflects a consistent belief that strong organizations are created when business discipline and human development reinforce one another.
International experience has been central to Szabolcs’s development as a leader. His career has included responsibilities and long-term exposure across Europe, Asia, and the United States, including leadership assignments connected with Hungary, Malaysia, China, Austria, and the United States. His work has required him to lead across cultural boundaries, integrate geographically dispersed teams, adapt global strategy to local realities, and build relationships with colleagues, customers, suppliers, and stakeholders from widely different backgrounds. He works professionally in English and Hungarian and brings a genuinely global perspective to organizations pursuing international growth or transformation.
For board and advisory service, Szabolcs offers more than functional expertise. He brings the perspective of an executive who has experienced organizations from multiple vantage points: finance and engineering, manufacturing and services, procurement and supply chain, talent and organizational development, operations and strategy, academic research and executive practice. His background allows him to identify connections that can be missed when business challenges are considered within functional silos. He is particularly well positioned to support manufacturing, engineering, industrial technology, OEM, EMS and supply-chain-intensive organizations facing growth, operational transformation, international expansion, leadership succession, acquisition integration, or organizational capability challenges.
Szabolcs leads with trust, integrity, respect, curiosity, and a strong commitment to creating value for others. His philosophy that no business can sustainably grow faster than its people reflects both his professional experience and his personal convictions. He believes lasting performance comes not from choosing between business results and people development, but from creating organizations in which capable people, clear strategy, disciplined processes, and appropriate technology reinforce one another. Outside his professional and academic activities, he enjoys traveling, hiking, spending time with his daughters, volunteering, and practicing Vipassana mindfulness meditation. These interests reflect the same curiosity, reflection, and commitment to continuous development that have shaped his career.
Character:
Szabolcs leads with trust, integrity, respect, and a strong sense of responsibility toward the people and organizations he serves. His belief that sustainable business growth depends on the development of people is evident in both his leadership record and his longstanding commitment to coaching, education, mentoring, and service.
Knowledge:
He combines extensive practical expertise in manufacturing, supply chain, procurement, operations, quality, lean, services, engineering, integration, and organizational development with advanced academic credentials in business and human behavior. His ability to connect operational experience with research, teaching, and leadership development gives him a multidimensional understanding of organizational performance.
Strategic:
Szabolcs approaches business challenges as interconnected enterprise systems rather than isolated functional problems. His experience managing global operations, major procurement portfolios, acquisition integrations, organizational transformations, and cross-functional initiatives enables him to evaluate both immediate operating priorities and the long-term capabilities required to create sustainable enterprise value.
Communication:
An experienced educator, facilitator, coach, presenter, and international leader who is comfortable communicating with audiences ranging from frontline employees to senior executives, academics, and business stakeholders. He translates complex concepts into practical language, creates alignment across cultures and functions, and uses communication as a tool for building trust, enabling change, and improving execution.
