The Heller Report: May Roundup of New C-Suite Tech Appointments

Among this month’s highlights: Northrup Grumman, the global aerospace and defense company, named Chuck Jones, who previously served as Raytheon’s vice president of digital operations, as its vice president and chief information and digital officer; fast-food giant McDonald’s appointed Mustafa Husain, most recently its vice president for restaurant technology engineering, as its new CIO; Turner, the international construction company, tapped Dawn Paquette, most recently CIO at GE Aerospace, as its new CIO; and design software firm Autodesk hired Mike Kelly, most recently an operating partner and CIO at venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, as its new CIO.

Getting executive agreement on strategic priorities is straightforward. Maintaining consensus is hard. IT executive and advisor Eduard de Vries Sands explains how to design commitment mechanisms that last by aligning around outcomes and establishing built-in incentives for business leaders to engage. “You want the right outcome to be the easiest path,” he writes.

The hypothesis in 2023 was clear: ban kids from using phones in school and they will pay more attention in class. A new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found the bans do take phones out of kids’ hands, but show “little evidence of effects on school attendance, self-reported classroom attention, or perceived online bullying.” Still, educators are bullish. One study author told The New York Times it’s early to expect major shifts, and he found the results encouraging. And an educator, Dr. Brice Beck of Cape Girardeau, Mo., said, “At lunch you will see all these kids, they’re talking to one another. It’s a lot louder, but the good kind of loud.” 

Heller was recently retained to recruit a Chief Information Officer for Legacy Food Group, a company created to acquire high-quality regional independent distributors that become owned operating divisions. By knitting together multiple distributors, Legacy Food Group achieves macro-scale effectiveness with local-market nimbleness, preserving the differences that work for independents while achieving synergies that can greatly benefit the divisions. For this role, we identified Jim Connolly, who most recently served as Vice President of Information Technology for LBB Specialties. Prior to that, he was Director of Information Technology for Concord Foods. Connolly holds a B.S. from Villanova University and an M.S. from Boston College. Congratulations, Jim!