Dear FIRST ® Supporters,
We’re excited to share with you an update on the FIRST HQ leadership team, announced today. The Board of Directors has promoted Interim President Chris Rake to Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer and are launching a search for a Chief Executive Officer, expanding FIRST HQ leadership capacity in support of growing FIRST programs to reach more young people around the world.
These past 18 months have shown us that world needs FIRST more than ever and positioned us for exciting growth in the years ahead. We are building additional leadership capacity within FIRST headquarters by creating new CEO and COO roles to provide us the expertise and resources to capitalize on exciting growth opportunities to expand FIRST programs.
Chris has done a fantastic job of leading the organization in an acting role these past several months, and we are very pleased with his leadership since joining FIRST HQ as VP of Programs in 2018. His promotion to the new and expanded role of EVP and COO demonstrates our confidence in Chris, his outstanding operational leadership, and his long-term value to the FIRST organization.
Through our innovative and diverse global network of STEM leaders, we are setting out to identify a passionate, world-class CEO to help further advance our mission to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators. Co-Chairs Kelly Ortberg and Don Bossi from the Board will lead the search committee, and we have retained executive search firm Korn Ferry to facilitate this effort. Read more in our announcement.
We’d love your support in identifying strong CEO candidates from within and outside the FIRST community. We invite you to share our announcement with your networks and send your ideas and suggestions to Keith Deussing, Senior Partner at Korn Ferry, via email at firstinspires@kornferry.com.
We hope to have a successful candidate selected later this year. In the meantime, Chris will continue to lead the organization. We appreciate your incredible ongoing support of our FIRST mission and global movement and look forward to a bright future for our community.
Sincerely,
Kelly Ortberg & Don Bossi
Co-Chairs, FIRST Board of Directors
I’m passionately neutral about most of this announcement. I feel as though, through this very tough past 18 months, or so, we’ve seen remarkably little come out of HQ. The few times there have been substantive communications, they’ve almost always come from Frank or his counterparts, and never from the most senior leaders of the organization.
It has led me to have almost no opinion on this interim President.
As a nerd, though, I’m of course excited that they’re moving to a CEO/COO model. I hope it will help the community better understand how responsibilities are shared at HQ, and hold the right folks accountable at the right time. We’ll see, though, as these are just words on a screen.
I agree here. This seems to be the right move.
I have been openly critical of almost no communication from both Lawrence Cohen and Chris Rake since Don Bossi left the president position. I sincerely hope that whomever the next CEO of FIRST is will be much more open to communicating with the community and public.
That’s slightly counter to my point. I think that with a CEO and COO, it’ll be more understandable that we don’t hear a ton from the CEO.
If a CEO is supervising the person in charge of executing the mission, and the person in charge of the money, and all the other departments, we shouldn’t expect to hear from them too much. The COO, on the other hand, should be dealing with much more immediate operational components, and I’d love to hear from them.
The challenge of the President is that they were expected to be all these things. It’s hard to oversee that much and also be a public communicator.
Am I correct in assuming the current CEO position is vacant and the President position no longer exists? (and/or is combined with CEO) The email mentions nothing about interims in those roles.
FIRST now lists him at EVP, COO and Acting Interim President.
I get what you are saying but then putting Chris Rake into the COO position of which whom we have heard nothing from yet as the Acting Interim President really doesn’t raise my confidence. Therefor I would hope that between the two we would hear more from the CEO (or someone) in that circumstance.
That’s certainly a fair criticism. I’d hope the communication improves from him in his new capacity rather than assuming it won’t.
We should set our expectations by the role someone is filling, not who the person is. I don’t expect to hear from the VP of safety glasses procurement, even if they’re a really cool person. I’d expect to hear from a COO more than a President, even if the person has a history of not communicating in a previous role.
As I said earlier, though, all we can do is see how this shakes out.
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