SCTE Hopes To Land New Chief By Year's End

Cable Technology Group Looks To Replace Outgoing CEO John Clark

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 7/1/2008 2:25:00 PM

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers wants to replace outgoing president and CEO John Clark before the end of 2008, chairman Tom Gorman said in an interview.

The SCTE announced Monday that Clark’s employment contract would end July 4.

Gorman (pictured), who is Charter Communications vice president of field operations and is serving a second term as SCTE chairman, said the search process has just begun. The organization still needs to develop a profile for the CEO candidate and has yet to contract with an executive-search firm.

SCTE’s next CEO will need to be “multifaceted,” according to Gorman, but the specific qualities desired for the executive have not yet been determined by the search committee, which is being headed up by Cisco Systems’ Frank Eichenlaub, western vice chair of the SCTE board.

“Do we need a degreed engineer? A marketing brain? An MBA? What’s their political connection to what’s going on in the industry?” Gorman said. “We have to weigh them all and say, ‘What do we need the most out of any of these?’”

SCTE VP of professional development Marv Nelson has been appointed interim president and CEO. Gorman called him "very capable," adding, "We won’t skip a beat while we go through this process."

The announcement of the leadership change came the week after the SCTE wrapped up its largest-ever Cable-Tec Expo in Philadelphia with 11,000 attendees.

Gorman said that when Clark joined SCTE 10 years ago, “SCTE was really trying to get some traction and what it required was someone with John’s skill at getting SCTE seen, heard and noticed. And John did that fantastically.”

Now, he continued, “times are changing, and now we have an opportunity to go in a different direction… The whole landscape is changing. With the industry move to realign tradeshows, there are lots of moving parts.”

Gorman noted that SCTE is the 15th-largest standards-setting organization accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Ten years ago, it was 79th.

One rumored candidate for the SCTE top spot has already circulated: Yvette Kanouff, chief strategy officer of SeaChange International, who served two terms as SCTE chairwoman from 2005 to 2007.

However, Kanouff, contacted via e-mail, said that while she will help with the search for the new CEO, “I have no plans to take the position myself.”