IPC President John Mitchell on the Past, Present, and Future, Part 1

Estimated reading time: 18 minutes

Mitchell: We’ve brought on three new board members, one of whom is sort of new. Two have never been on the board before. The first is Tom Edman, president and CEO of TTM, the second largest PCB company in the world now. IPC is very pleased to see him involved with the IPC Board because he has a pulse on PCB across the globe. PCB is an important segment to our industry and we want to make sure we have board representation for that segment. We've also got Nilesh Naik on there, who is a different type of board manufacturer in that realm. He's more a specialization, rapid prototype, smaller shop, so we get a couple of different views of the PCB industry on the Board now.

Then, the other new board member is Robert Feuerstein. Robert is out of Continental Automotive, Gmbh, so again we're getting European representation on the board. As you know, Continental is very automotive-focused and they've been very active in IPC recently. One of Robert’s employees at Continental, Stan Rak, has been very active in helping us get more involved with both Continental and the automotive space, as well as getting them involved with IPC. Just yesterday, Stan won an IPC Rising Star award. This is the first year we’ve had this award.

Matties: That is also an interesting award.

Mitchell: Yeah, we wanted to start recognizing people who are new to the IPC world…who have really just stepped up within the past five years. We should recognize their contribution. We don’t have to wait 30 years before we say ‘good job.’ Let’s recognize them right now. He’s led several committees. Just the day before the awards, he walked up to David Bergman, our VP of Standards and Technology, and said, “I've got an idea for a great European standard.” He shared his idea and Dave’s response was, “I've been trying to get somebody interested in this. I'm glad you're interested. Let's get a committee together.” He’s already doing great things like that.

Matties: And there are a few more changes.

Mitchell: Yes, Steve Pudles is coming back on the Board as well. We’ve restructured the executive committee, so for the next two years Joe O’Neil will be our chair, which is great. Joe knows the industry. Joe is like the picture story of what you can do in this industry. He started off as a line worker and ended up in an ownership position of his company. That's pretty awesome.

Matties: We’ve known Joe for many years, what a great success story.

Mitchell: Mikel Williams is our Board vice chair. Mikel was formerly with DDI and now he's president and CEO of Targus. Mikel’s a brilliant guy as well. We’re looking forward to continuing to work with him. New on the executive committee is Shane Whiteside, formerly COO of TTM. He’s now on a couple of different boards in the industry and he has his own consulting company as well. He’ll be taking over as secretary-treasurer.

It’s just a great group of people. Marc Peo will move from the Chairman to the Immediate Past Chair. He’ll still be involved on the executive committee.

Then there is Tony Zhou from RayVal of China, Bob Neves from MicroTek China Labs, and Mike Carano from RBP Chemical. The three of them finished their first term of four years and wanted to stay involved. They were elected in and will be on for another four years. It’s just great.

Matties: It's a good team for sure.

Mitchell: It really is. They care about this industry. They want to see IPC help the industry grow and help the industry be more effective and efficient. That’s what we spend all our time talking about on the Board—how can I, as the operational leader, take our team and fulfill that vision? It's a big vision and I hope you have a chance to interview some of them and ask them how it’s going.

Matties: I'm just curious, how might the dynamics of the board change the direction or purpose?

Mitchell: The board has always done a really good job of taking off their corporate hat and setting it aside to look at what's best for the industry. That’s really what they try to do, because IPC is trying to serve this $2 trillion industry…and that’s a big job. So we have to be focused and aligned in our mission. In the Board meeting that we just finished, we did a brainstorming session for much of it. Where would we like to see IPC in 2020? We call it our 2020 Vision, like 20/20 vision.

We looked at each of our aspirational goals and just let the board talk. That gave some fodder for the staff to then go back and try to build plans around that so that we can say, “We can't do the 733 ideas they came up with, but here's the three or four that we think are going to have the most return for the industry and make the most impact and help us move it along.”

Matties: How do you measure that return? I've heard is IPC is really driven, and the key measure is the revenue that they make. Is it just about money?

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