IEEE Candidates Forum

IEEE-USA President Ron Jensen kicked off the IEEE-USA Annual Meeting this evening. With more than 200 attendees, this year's IEEE-USA Annual Meeting is sure to be exciting! Following the keynote speaker, Ron led a Q&A session with the two candidates running for IEEE President-Elect, Roger Pollard and Peter Staecker.

Below are excerpts from their remarks and responses to a few questions posed by meeting attendees.

Opening Remarks

Pollard: I’ve been an academic for the last 36 years, but I’ve also worked in industry. I just retired from the University of Leeds in England. I’ve been chair of the electrical engineering department and dean of engineering. I’m continuing to work part-time for a small outfit called Agilent Technologies and I’ve consulted for them for the last 30 years. I’ve been an IEEE volunteer for more than 35 years and I’ve done my share of duty in chapters, I’ve been a section chair, I’ve worked on the region committee, been active in the Microwave Theory & Techniques Society, been on TAB, PSPB, and on the Board of Directors. What I’d like to talk to you about is that I see the future of IEEE in terms of a number of major issues. The first of these is that IEEE is transnational -- IEEE’s leader must understand the U.S. base and the issues that its members raise and that’s because this is where the majority of our members live. Membership is and remains at the heart of IEEE. I support the development of a multi-tiered membership structure. Create a new membership model where everyone would have a society membership bundled in with membership. They should accrue additional benefits that are based on years of membership. We need to make a number of other disciplines, like life sciences, welcome here. All the world’s problems and challenges are interdisciplinary and we cannot live in silos. IEEE must get involved in education at all levels, that’s the only way we can ensure the future of our membership. The future of IEEE is about building a global community.

Staecker: I am also from the Microwave Theory & Techniques (MTT) Society. I am not an academic, I grew up at Lincoln Lab and then went to industry where I spent the rest of my career. I’ve been a member of the MTT society for many years, I’ve been working with IEEE for many years and I just completed my fifth year on the Board of Directors. What I want to talk about is advancing technology for humanity. In that short little phrase there is much direction and challenge for us. Advancing technology means advancing the business of our technology. We are highly regarded for our publications, this is the business we’re in. We’re in this business in a very competitive environment and while we have a good position and we have a strong record of providing very good content we need to work on this every day. We need to move away from just supplying PDFs, we need to supply knowledge. This is going to take a lot of investment. Advancing technology means enlarging our technology footprint and we’re having trouble doing that because we have 45 societies and we’re tightly grouped and we’re filling in the footprint by filling in the white space and this leads to arguments of who owns what and instead we should think outside the box. Grand challenges should give us ideas to move into the life sciences. We need to constantly improving member value globally. You have set the tempo for moving that into the rest of the world. We’ll look to you for guidance on that. The tricky part is that to be effective globally you have to be successful locally. And this is tough stuff. You can argue that this is a little easier to do in Regions 1-6 because we’re kind of homogenous. We can gain from our diversity. Advancing technology means preparing our youth from K-12. It’s very important to prepare youth for engineering careers. 

1. How do you see the role of IEEE-USA fitting into the larger IEEE?

Staecker: I think IEEE-USA is the poster child for member careers. That’s the immediate plus. Anything having to do with member value and career help is something that you’ve been doing here for a long time. 

Pollard: I think if IEEE-USA didn’t exist you’d have to invent it. In almost every other country that I know of, IEEE co-exists with a national society. In the U.S., IEEE is the national society, IEEE-USA exists embedded in it and it’s stronger and better for that. I believe that being able to represent the profession in the strongest possible way to your government of whatever flavor as well as being able to be embedded in a technical profession is important. 

2. How do you plan to reverse declining membership in IEEE-USA?

Pollard: That’s a difficult question. The real problem is that there is a decline in membership in all kinds of societies and associations. People are reluctant to join anything -- it’s not unique to IEEE-USA or any organization. What you need to do is demonstrate value. People need to feel that they are joining a community of other like-minded people and what they’ll get out of it is as valuable to them. It seems to me the community is the important thing, the way in which they feel they are made to be viewed as important by the people who count -- the people who create jobs, the people who take your taxes, etc. Get that message out there and make sure people understand what it is that IEEE-USA and IEEE is all about and it’s not about: you pay your money and we deliver you goods and services. It’s about creating a community with like-minded professionals with goals of where they want to be.

Staecker: This is an element of IEEE that’s been leaving us -- the practitioner. We are not relevant to the people who deal with specifications, standards, program directors, etc. Those people do not find value in IEEE. We’re not going to be able to do it through the standard offerings that we have now because they’re all designed now for high-level research and academics. The Xplore database offerings are ideally tailored for moving forward through an academic career but don’t help the practitioner. We can do that and increase our membership. 

3. Why is there an IEEE-USA and not an IEEE Europe or IEEE Asia? Is this a potential source of resentment to international members?

Staecker: Yes, but there are features in IEEE-USA that should be in every region. I see elements of that happening already. There’s an organization in Region 8, they’re working on member careers and member value and so if the concept of IEEE-USA were to change at all, it could change in a way that would be uniform across all regions. I don’t see it as a lasting problem.

Pollard: To answer that question you’ve got to understand we’re a product of our history. In the case of several countries in Europe, their national associations started off as gatekeepers and some still are. In order to practice engineering you needed to join an organization. IEEE offered membership and has never set itself out to be a gatekeeper and that’s the biggest difference historically. It’s very unlikely given the history that things like IEEE Europe or IEEE Australia, would exist on same sort of basis because of the way IEEE-USA has grown. It’s a good idea but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

4. Member engagement requires better communications top down and bottom up. do you have a vision of how that should work?

Pollard: I think we do a pretty good job of communications top-down. Everything from the various publications and e-mail lists. I’m sure people get fed up with top-down communication. We haven’t been doing good with bottom-up communication. This is great opportunity for social media -- Facebook and LinkedIn are beginning to create a bottom-up source of consensus of member views and member groupings and these are being read quite avidly at the top of IEEE to get messages of what members think and want and ways to share experience and knowledge. The bottom-up communication is growing quite rapidly.

Staecker: I agree with Roger on the social media piece. It’s really helping us understand what’s going on and that plays right into the issue of: to be effective globally, you need to be ffective locally. You’re going to have to have networks that associate the feelings of localities and move them right up to the top level. Who is going to do this? I think it’s going to be the young people of our society because they’re the ones who are so good at it now. I’ve had the pleasure and honor of working with GOLD for the past few years and those folks are just amazing. They offer the bridge between students who are in the school and the full members who are in IEEE and they are the ones who are communicating on a daily or hourly basis about what they do and what they think we should do, but you don’t have to be young.

5. What are your top 3 activities you will champion to generate more value for IEEE members?

Staecker: [1] The business aspect of our technology -- we’re in a competitive world and we need to be competitive. [2] Member value. [3] Continuing education.

Pollard: [1] You need to make sure that there is more information that is relevant to the whole range of our stakeholders, especially the practitioners. The information is there, the trouble right now is that it’s data in Xplore and we need to mine that data to find information practitioners can use. [2] Change the membership model and expand the range of different benefits and different values people can get from it. Membership cannot be one size fits all. [3] Understand member development through their careers and make sure we have a range of offerings that are applicable to people in different stages in their careers and employed in different industry and activities.

6. How should we better market benefits of IEEE membership?

Pollard: The biggest problem that I have right now with IEEE membership as we presently market it is that we say to people: “Come along, join IEEE, pay your dues, and that will give you a nice magazine every month and in addition it will entitle you to buy a whole range of other products and services you can find about it.” That has seemed to be on the old side for me. We recruit people just to sell them products and services. We need to rebuild the membership model. We do not have a very clear value proposition for what IEEE is. Why should you become a member of IEEE? Until we have that value proposition -- I think it’s first and foremost about community (networking, etc.) -- it becomes very difficult to sell it. That’s not just a local problem it’s a global problem and it’s demonstrated in our retention issue. 

Staecker: I agree with Roger, we need to focus on membership but there are other things. Advancing technology for humanity -- it’s the humanity piece that will make us more familiar to more people. That in itself is a good advertisement for IEEE. The humanity piece is beginning to happen; we have a number of volunteers who are interested in reaching out and helping people less fortunate than themselves. What we need to do is encourage that. The other part is to inform the public through all volunteer activities of what is going on in IEEE and make us more visible.

7. IEEE-USA has been very effective at affecting policy in the U.S., how can IEEE affect policy outside of the U.S.?

Staecker: I don’t know the governmental issues or how easy it is to have discourse in other regions. There’s a certainly a model for interaction that can be adapted to any region.

Pollard: I think that the answer to this question is about understanding that governments are actually the same worldwide. Governments are usually ill-informed. I don’t know what the situation is in the U.S., but there is only one qualified scientist in Parliament. The problem is ignorance. IEEE-USA is a good role model for everybody else in the other regions in the world to combat that ignorance, how to effectively provide factual information and lobby not on the basis of “we give you lots of money or we vote for you,” but here is fact, here is real useful information, please read it, please take some notes on it. Those are lessons that IEEE-USA can give to other parts of the world and I think it’s been singly effective to lobbying in Washington.

Closing remarks

Staecker: We are technologists. We live to solve problems, incremental as well as big picture. We can do all this stuff that we need to do.

Pollard:  IEEE is important. IEEE is important not just to all of us but to the world at large because it’s one of the very few gatherings together of people across these boundaries that can solve big world challenges. It seems to me that the future of IEEE is about building a global community of technologists working to create the future. Technology and technologists do not know boundaries, least of all geographic-wise. If we can build this global community we can have some sense that we are doing something about creating a sense of community for our children and grandchildren.