IndustryWeek Selects Bill George for Manufacturing Hall of Fame

CLEVELAND, Nov. 18 /PRNewswire/ — The editors of Penton Media’s IndustryWeek have selected 10 honorees for the inaugural class of the IW Manufacturing Hall of Fame. IndustryWeek is the premiere publication serving executive and operations leaders in the manufacturing industry. IndustryWeek has a long history of acknowledging the leaders of manufacturing operations through distinguishing programs such as the IW 50, IW 500 and IW Best Plants.

Through the IW Manufacturing Hall of Fame, IndustryWeek now is extending recognition to individual leaders in the manufacturing community whose vision, leadership, and legacy not only provided value to their individual organizations but also beneficially impacted the larger business community and our society. A feature story in our December 2009 issue will highlight these achievements to the 121,000 subscribers of IndustryWeek and also will appear on the IndustryWeek Web site at: www.industryweek.com/mfg2009hof. IndustryWeek is pleased to highlight their accomplishments to our audience of manufacturing leaders.

The IW Manufacturing Hall of Fame is presented by INFOR.

George David – David will retire as chairman of the board of directors of United Technologies Corp. at the end of 2009 after a 34-year career. During that career, he served 14 years as CEO of UTC and helped UTC triple its revenue, expand globally and focus on its process and technology disciplines.

Joseph Engelberger – Founder of Unimation, the first robot company and considered the “father of robotics,” Engelberger went on to found HelpMate Robotics. He is the author of “Robotics in Practice and Robotics in Service,” and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Progress Award of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, the Leonardo da Vinci Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the 1997 Japan Prize, the highest Japanese technology honor.

William George – After distinguished careers at Litton Industries and Honeywell, George became CEO and chairman of the board of Medtronic. Under his leadership, Medtronic’s market capitalization grew from $1.1 billion to $60 billion, averaging 35% a year. He now serves as a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.

Andrew Grove – A senior adviser at Intel, Grove helped found the company Intel in 1968 and served as its CEO from 1987 to 1998. Grove has written more than 40 technical papers and holds several patents on semiconductor devices and technology. He heads the Grove Foundation, a private philanthropic organization and focuses on supporting research on Parkinson’s disease.

Charles O. Holliday – Chairman of the board of directors of DuPont and former CEO, Holliday shifted DuPont from basic chemical production to biotechnology and championed sustainability and opportunities for women in the workplace. He is chairman of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness and co-authored “Walking the Talk,” which sets out the business case for sustainable development and corporate responsibility.

Lee Iacocca – An engineer by training, Iacocca rose rapidly through the ranks at Ford Motor Co. to become its president, but his most famous achievement was the triumphant turnaround of Chrysler Corp. Since leaving Chrysler, he has been an author, consultant, entrepreneur and served numerous charitable organizations, most notably the Iacocca Foundation, which focuses on diabetes research.

Steve Jobs – In the drive for innovation, few corporate executives rival the track record of Apple CEO Jobs, whose early success with the Mac computer has been followed by the iPod and iPhone, not to mention the iTunes music store and Pixar Animation Studios. Jobs’ demands for products that combine ease of use and elegance, along with his promotional skills, make him one of today’s most admired and controversial executives.

Gordon Lankton – Chairman of the Board of Nypro Inc., Lankton worked for Stanley Works and DuPont before joining the global plastics injection molding company in 1962 and leading its growth from $600,000 in revenue to its current $1 billion. In 1998 he sold his Nypro stock to Nypro’s Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), creating one of the largest U.S. employee-owned companies. In 2007 he founded the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, Mass., with the largest collection of Russian icons publicly displayed outside of Russia.

Jack Welch – A chemical engineer by training, Welch joined General Electric in 1960 and became its youngest vice president in 1972. In 1981, he began a 20-year tenure as GE CEO, during which the company’s market capitalization rose from $13 billion to $400 billion. Welch streamlined GE operations, championed Six Sigma and combined latitude for GE managers with an insistence that GE businesses be at the top of their market segments.

James Womack – From 1975-1991 Womack was a research scientist at MIT directing a series of comparative studies of world manufacturing practices. Womack led the research team that coined the term “lean production” to describe the Toyota Production System. He is the co-author of such influential bestsellers as “The Machine That Changed the World” and “Lean Thinking”. He founded the Lean Enterprise Institute in 1997.

Congratulations to IW Manufacturing Hall of Fame Inaugural Class of 2009.

Contact: Bethany Weaver, 1-216-931-9551, bethany.weaver@penton.com.