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Present is Prologue

Tag: CEO

  • Blackboard CEO’s First 100 Days: Reorganization and Learn Ultra Updates

    Just over four years after Providence Equity Partners acquired Blackboard and three years after they brought in Jay Bhatt to replace co-founder Michael Chasen, the company hired Bill Ballhaus as its new CEO at the beginning of January. 100 days in, Ballhaus is starting to make changes to the organization and providing some insights into future corporate directions.

    The most significant change is a reorganization that combines strategy, product management and marketing in one group under Katie Blot. In an interview Michael and I had with Ballhaus and Blot earlier this week, they described the primary motivation for the organizational change as the need to more tightly align those functions. Also significant is that this change means the departure of Mark Strassman, SVP Product Marketing & Management, and Tracey Stout, SVP of Marketing & Sales Effectiveness. Blackboard provided the following statement. (more…)

  • Blackboard Replaces CEO Jay Bhatt: What happened

    Just over four years since Providence Equity Partners acquired Blackboard and three years after they brought in Jay Bhatt to replace co-founder Michael Chasen, the company announced another change in CEO. Blackboard has removed Jay Bhatt and replaced him with Bill Ballhaus. The official reason from the announcement:

    Today, we are fortunate to be joined by a great leader – our new CEO Bill Ballhaus. Bill’s philosophy is directly in line with ours and his skill set is going to help us reach new heights. While this is certainly a change for Blackboard, rest assured that the heart of our mission and strategy will remain the same. [snip]

    So we have defined our strategy and now, with Bill joining the company, we’ll continue to execute against it. Bill has accomplished much over his career and his operational expertise has led various businesses to great success. He and I share a fundamental belief that if you make your first priority taking care of your customers, the business results will follow. So, under his leadership Blackboard will continue our focus on doing just that. We will deliver next generation teaching and learning capabilities to the market, continue our international growth, and improve even further the way we serve our customers and strive to exceed their expectations. Bill is uniquely positioned to help us execute against these priorities, and with him we’ll achieve significant advances for our customers and for Blackboard.

    While the official messaging is ‘full steam ahead’, to me this is a straightforward story that we have already been covering at e-Literate. In a nutshell, the attempted sale of Blackboard this year has failed, and the company has stalled in its turnaround attempts. (more…)

  • Partial Transcript: Richard Levin (new Coursera CEO) on Charlie Rose

    I have written two posts recently about Coursera’s appointment of the former president of Yale as the company’s new CEO, with the implicit argument that this move represents a watershed moment for commercial MOOCs. In particular, Coursera seems likely to become the third generation of Richard Levin’s dream, following AllLearn and Open Yale Courses. I’ve also argued that Levin is embellishing the history by making Internet bandwidth a primary factor in the demise of AllLearn when the lack of a viable business model was the more important issue, with even Levin arguing this point.

    Richard Levin was just interviewed by Charlie Rose, and I am including a transcript of most of the segment (starting around 3:15), highlighting some key points in bold. This interview should give us further insight into the future of commercial MOOCs, especially as we have the first non-founder CEO in one of the big three commercial MOOC providers. Follow this link to watch on CharlieRose.com and avoid the annoying Hulu ad.

    Rose: You could have gotten a government job, as an ambassador or something; maybe been Secretary of the Treasury as far as I know . . . you could have done a lot of things. But you’re out running some online education company (laughs).

    Levin: It’s a fantastic mission, it’s really the perfect job for me and for following a university president’s [job].

    Rose: Why’s that?

    Levin: One, I like running things, so it’s an opportunity to run something. But most important it’s so much an extension of what I’ve tried to do. It’s to take Yale to the world, and this is an opportunity to take 108 of the world’s greatest educational institutions (and there’ll probably be some more) and teach the planet.

    (more…)

  • CEO Transition at Blackboard is Latest Move in Corporate Turnaround

    On Monday of this past week Michael Chasen announced that he is leaving Blackboard, the company he co-founded in 1997 and has led as CEO since 2001. Blackboard simultaneously announced the appointment of Jay Bhatt, a software industry executive as the immediate replacement.

    As Rip Empson has noted in TechCrunch, this is the end of an era. I agree with Josh Kim and Ray Henderson in calling out Michael Chasen’s role as an industry pioneer, and I would argue that Chasen was the leading force in creating the enterprise-level, mission-critical educational technology market. Henderson also points out that Chasen played a leading role in developing a sustainable revenue model that enabled much of the transformation seen over the past decade.

    Empson described in his article that this are two sides of this latest story from Blackboard.

     This week, in a letter addressed to “The Education Community,” Michael Chasen stepped down as the CEO of edtech software giant, Blackboard. In a way, it’s the end of an era. Whether or not it was an “era to remember” remains to be seen.

    Why is this significant? Because of what Blackboard has come to represent — both for good and for ill. On the one hand, the company became one of the biggest success stories in the education space, bringing mainstream consumer and investor attention (and scale) to an industry that previously had little. But that’s only one part of Blackboard’s story.

    What should we expect from the future Blackboard? I believe the best way to understand future changes at Blackboard is to view the CEO transition as the latest move in a corporate turnaround – and an unsurprising move .

    (more…)