Strategy in TECH...
Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA) announced today that it has appointed Amanda Beckner as its new Vice President of Education and Training. Beckner replaces the recently departed Samantha Ventura and is said to bring two decades of experience to the role. Most notably, Beckner was VP of Learning for AVIXA, the commercial integrator trade group.
In a rare show of bipartisanship, a group of U.S. Senators has sent a strongly worded letter to a leading consumer electronics industry remote control maker Universal Electronics, Inc. (UEI) launching a probe into the company’s hiring practices in China. Unique to UEI is that they own their own factories in China (most contract with existing China OEM factories) and a recent damning investigation by Reuters alleges the company is working with the Chinese government to utilize a widely persecuted Uyghur minority in a forced labor arrangement, a human rights violation. UEI has denied the accusation but so far has not provided data to back up their denial.
CI coaching business Vital announced this week that well-known industry veteran Lawrence Davis has joined the company as its new VP of Business Development. The company says that this move is “the first step in their growth plan.”
A leading tech industry-focused executive search firm, The Park West Group, has recently expanded by adding Mark Crandell as its Managing Director. The company, which touts the tagline “Wired for Success,” says this expansion of its team will both help to drive organizational effectiveness and open new opportunities for growth.
Last Friday, Strata-gee broke the news that both Cheena Srinivasan and Michael Malcolm, co-founders of Kaleidescape, had left the company recently to pursue new opportunities. (A third co-founder, Dan Collens, left the company back in 2006.) Kaleidescape, the leading media server manufacturer in the upscale residential space, is an important supplier to many custom integrators, so this is a big change. Late Friday, after Strata-gee broke the news of the change, the company put out a formal statement on the situation.
Earlier this week, sources told Strata-gee that Kaleidescape co-founders Michael Malcolm and Cheena Srinivasan have left the company. Malcolm is said to have left a couple of months ago and Srinivasan reportedly left the organization just last week.
A few weeks back while on a work assignment unrelated to Strata-gee, I had the opportunity to meet for the first time Alice Schmalzl, the new Chief Operating Officer (COO) at CT Lab, the company that owns Dealerscope, Connected Design, and the CE Week show. During the course of a lunch meeting lasting over two-hours, Schmalzl was engaging, articulate, thought-provoking, refreshingly transparent, and funny. I found her incredibly smart, with a strong business foundation, and I sensed she possessed a steely inner-toughness. I resolved then and there to interview her for a Strata-gist profile for Strata-gee readers.
Business guru Tom Peters has written a total of 18 business books selling in the aggregate more than 10,000,000 copies. But just one of those books is itself responsible for about half that total – or 5,000,000 copies. That book, In Search of Excellence, was published in 1982 in collaboration with Robert H. Waterman, Jr. and is to this day considered one of, if not the, most successful business books of all time.
I should note that neither Crestron, nor Randy Klein is featured in the book. But many of the 43 public companies that are profiled in that book as organizations that embraced processes that drive excellence would, in just a few short years after publication, fall into hard times themselves. Companies like Wang Labs, Xerox, and NCR in subsequent years were no longer excellent – and so it would seem that, as the old saying goes, “success is fleeting.”
Jeff Caton, CEO of High-Tech Network, died suddenly at his home in Norris, Tennessee on Saturday, July 31st. He was just 62-years-old. Caton, one of the most respected manufacturer sales representatives in the Southeast region, was widely known for his unique blend of hustle and humanity.
Crestron announced on Monday that it was joining with members of the Bargetzi family to create the Fred Bargetzi Memorial Scholarship, created to honor the memory of the company’s much-beloved and long-time Chief Technology Officer Fred Bargetzi, who passed away in January of this year. The scholarship will be for select students of Bargetzi’s alma mater, the University at Buffalo, and will serve both “to empower students at the University at Buffalo to succeed in their education by removing barrier’s from their progress”…and to offer a lasting legacy of the CTO who was so meaningful to one of this industry’s greatest technology companies.
