Amped to teach: Business professor Lisa Franklin draws on battery expertise
“There are no boring products,” Professor Lisa Franklin ’82 frequently reminds Carthage business students.
Skeptics only have to glance at Prof. Franklin’s office wall for evidence. Framed patents, accumulated during her 26-year career at Johnson Controls, signify advances in the unglamorous automotive battery market.
Nobody starts out as an expert. Early in her career, a customer looking for 9-volt batteries caught her off-guard at the Radio Shack store she managed. “Which ones are those?” she wondered silently.
Learning enough to send the person home with the right product to keep a smoke alarm or clock radio running constituted a small victory that day. In the years ahead, her inquisitive nature would produce much bigger wins for Johnson Controls.
And now?
“I love batteries,” Prof. Franklin says with sincerity. “I have friends all over the world because of that job.”
“Consumers can only tell you about needs that are obvious to them. The best innovations address problems that people have just subconsciously accepted.”
In class, she coaches students to embrace that mindset and shift their curiosity into a higher gear.
“Consumers can only tell you about needs that are obvious to them,” she says. “The best innovations address problems that people have just subconsciously accepted.”
TERMINAL FULFILLMENT
Raised just outside of Kenosha in the village of Pleasant Prairie, Prof. Franklin graduated from Tremper High School and enrolled at Carthage in 1978.
Embracing her hometown college’s emphasis on the liberal arts, she took the grand tour of possible majors before settling on geography. The blend of art and science intrigued her, even as she kept her career options open.
Preceding an era of expansion, full-time enrollment at the time hovered around 1,150. That made it feasible to know practically everyone else on campus.
“I loved every minute of my time at Carthage,” Prof. Franklin says. “It was wonderful.”
This feature story first appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of The Carthaginian magazine.
That Radio Shack gig and a couple of sales jobs supplied her first couple of resume entries, and in 1991 she took a customer service position in the automotive battery division at Johnson Controls. Headquartered in Milwaukee at the time, it was the nation’s leading supplier.
Supervisors soon promoted the savvy young employee to the firm’s international arm, largely because she had studied French.
“These things you learn in school come into play unexpectedly,” says Prof. Franklin.
Her steady climb continued with management roles in marketing, sales, and product development. Looking back, the upbeat professor chuckles about the lone con in a career that overflowed with pros: Her parents could never wrap their heads around what she did.
They practically begged for a simple term to include alongside her siblings’ self-explanatory occupations, flight attendant and court reporter. When Prof. Franklin started to acquire the battery patents, Mom and Dad thought they’d finally solved it.
“She’s an inventor!” they bragged to friends and neighbors.
Close enough.
COMING FULL CIRCLE
By the time her Carthage sorority reunion rolled around in 2015, the successful alumna had risen to director of global product strategy and portfolio management at Johnson Controls. She started to ponder a new challenge.
While reminiscing with sisters on campus, she had an epiphany: I should teach here. Not long afterward, she came across a job listing for an adjunct faculty member to teach marketing at her alma mater. She inquired by email and got a reply 15 minutes later.
“I feel like teaching was a calling,” says Prof. Franklin. “I was essentially doing it all along.”
For several years, she taught evening classes while sunlighting as a consultant. In 2022, the College promoted her to the full-time faculty.
Sure, enrollment has more than doubled since she attended, but some of the best attributes remain unchanged. Like the personal connections formed in small classes.
As a student, young Lisa wished in vain that her absences from those painful 8 a.m. classes would slip past professors unnoticed. Sitting in their seat now, she gets it.
“If my students aren’t in class, I worry about them,” Prof. Franklin admits.
Undergraduate students take classes like Consumer Behavior, Marketing Research, and the senior seminar with her.
“She goes above and beyond to make personal connections with students and understand their individual learning styles,” says Carly McLaughlin ’24, who’s pursuing a master’s in interior architecture and design through the Academy of Art University. “I walked away from every class with Professor Franklin feeling heard, valued, and filled with new knowledge.”
Insisting that failure is an excellent teacher, the professor shares both ups and downs from her career.
“She often explained how she got ahead while being at a systemic disadvantage,” adds Ms. McLaughlin, “and that being a woman in business should not stop you from achieving high standards in a company, following your passions, or speaking up in a room you feel silenced in.”
PRODUCT MASTERY
In a world that’s saturated with competing products, no company has the luxury of waiting for a “Eureka!” moment. The only way forward is to tap into that bottomless curiosity and figure out how to connect customer needs to technical solutions.
As a valuable exercise, Prof. Franklin challenges her students to enhance a flawed product — like foil yogurt lids, a personal pet peeve. Not only do those take forever to open, she explains, but anyone who succeeds in that quest invariably has to dodge little dairy projectiles.
“No one thinks to say ‘Make a container that doesn’t spit on me and ruin my day.’ They just grumble and change their shirt,” she says. “We’re trained to look for the unspoken needs that others ignore.”
“We’re trained to look for the unspoken needs that others ignore.”
Despite her years in the field, Prof. Franklin didn’t fully grasp how the pieces fit together until she went back to school for a master’s degree from Northwestern University. So she has a soft spot for Carthage graduate students.
“Lisa is incredibly empathetic and knowledgeable,” says Bradley Toshner, M.Sc. ’25 who studied product management. “She mixes in real world perspectives and keeps the material tangible through course-long group projects that apply the lessons.”
Mr. Toshner heard good reviews about Carthage’s graduate business program from a trusted source: his wife, Chloe, M.Sc. ’22. Now, degree in hand, his pivot from software engineering to technical product management is underway.
“I can leverage my five years as an engineer and this degree to launch my career down the path I’ve always wanted,” he says. “I see software through a completely different lens since beginning this program, so I know I made the right choice. It’ll serve me well.”
Likewise, teaching was the right move for Prof. Franklin. Energetic students recharge her battery on a daily basis. So many exciting unknowns lie ahead for them, she’s actually a little jealous. Not that she’d want a do-over of her own career — more like a sequel.
With her trademark optimism, this Carthaginian insists “it’s still the best time in the history of the world to be alive.”