Barbara Hulit appointed president of Fluke Corporation
Everett, Wash.-Barbara B. Hulit has been named president of Fluke Corporation, with responsibility for the Fluke Industrial and Fluke Precision Measurement businesses.
Hulit comes to Fluke from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where she was a vice president and director with responsibility for the firm's packaged goods sector. As president of Fluke, Hulit will report to Jim Lico, executive vice president for Danaher Corporation, the parent company of Fluke.
Lico says, "Barbara has partnered with many of our senior leaders in strategy and business development, as well as having played an active role in developing our Danaher Business Systems (DBS) Growth Tools initiatives."
Over the past seven years, Hulit has worked extensively with Fluke and was instrumental in the identification of the company's new indoor air quality and thermography businesses. At BCG, she helped grow the global packaged goods sector by roughly 20 percent annually, leveraging her expertise in uncovering and driving new business opportunities. Her background also includes senior positions in sales and marketing for Noxell Corporation, Frito Lay and Marketing Corporation of America. Hulit holds an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and a BA in Marketing from the University of Texas-Austin.
Clearly this will change Fluke's old core business drastically. Danaher clearly expects to shake up the old original Fluke the way they did Fluke Networks in the 1990s, with resultant huge gains in revenue. What's interesting here is that while Hulit doesn't come from the very tight Fluke Old Boys network, she's been around Fluke long enough to get some serious street cred with the in-house tech crowd there. Her engineering of the thermography business acquisitions and development gave her a real reputation as knowing what she is doing.
Now she becomes one of the few female CEOs in the automation, test and measurement, and metrology marketplaces. She'll be going up against that part of HP that Carly sold off: Agilent, and we'll now see if she is a female CEO or a CEO who happens to be a woman. My bet is on the latter.
Walt
