LG Electronics (Bizarre) Re-Shuffle
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
LG Electronics must be absolutely mad as news reached us this morning that Jeff Dowell’s position, that of Vice President, Digital Signage in the LGE US, Business Solutions Group was eliminated yesterday in some kind of (bizarre) re-shuffle.
In the all too short time we spent with Jeff he was one of the display manufacturer execs that actually got this thing called ‘digital signage’. His work building out an eco-system around LG made an awful lot of sense. His work with BroadSign and the SuperSign stuff was visionary.
Jeff presided over one of the genuinely interesting things to come out of DSE 2011 as well. Gobsmacked to say the least.
March 10th, 2011 at 20:34 @898
Unfortunately, not so “bizarre” if you know LG and what they’ve been going through with digital signage for the last few years. Per usual, they are trying to play catch up (and imitate) to big brother Samsung rather than creating something new in the space. This was a model Jeff was trying desperately to change, but a model that is rooted deep in the corporate DNA.
As LG struggles with all of it businesses, their decisions become more about internal politics than good and reasonable business modeling.
Agreed, Jeff had come up with something that could have finally made a difference in this crazy industry, but it required time beyond the birthing canal, and the business will to see it through, which simply was not going to happen within the highly charged and competitive internal ranks of this South Korean company. Bottom line, Jeff was a fair minded, gifted, business innovator, swimming with some pretty nasty corporate sharks.
Oh well, I guess now we’ll get to see another Magic Info knockoff coming from the people who don’t understand what it truly takes to be innovative in our space.