Carl Yankowski

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Carl J. Yankowski (born 1949) is a United States business executive specializing in the marketing of technology and consumer products. He has held senior positions at Sony Electronics, Reebok, and Palm, Inc.. He is currently CEO of Ambient Devices.

Yankowski attended high school in Butler, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1966. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gaining simultaneous degrees in electrical engineering and management (from the MIT Sloan School of Management).

Upon graduation he worked as a systems analyst and electrical engineer for Procter & Gamble but discovered that he preferred marketing to engineering. He developed promotional campaigns for Pringles and Duncan Hines mixes. At General Electric, he helped develop the Spacemaker range with its "We Bring Good Things to Light" campaign. He then moved to Memorex where he worked on the "Is It Live Or Is It Memorex" campaign before working on the three-year Pepsi Challenge campaign for PepsiCo.

He joined Polaroid Corporation in 1988 as a corporate vice president with initial responsibility for all business imaging, U.S. consumer and industrial marketing before moving to Hong Kong as group vice president for the corporation's Asia/Pacific region. He then returned to the United States to become the president and chief operating officer of Sony Electronics in November 1993. Yankowski left Sony in January 1998 "to address immediate family health issues".^{[citation needed]} He became president and chief executive officer of Reebok Brand in September 1998.

Yankowski joined 3Com to head its Palm division on 13 December 1999. In his first year at Palm, he became chief executive officer, transforming the division of 3Com into a public company with a market capitalization of US$30 billion. The company's success faded fast, however, falling to less than 5% of that value over the next year. He left Palm on 8 November 2001 and set up as a management consultant under the name 'Westerham Group'. From June 2001 until February 2003 he was a director of Novell. Since July 2003 he has been a non-executive director of Informatica Corporation and Chase Corporation.

On 27 August 2004 Yankowski was appointed CEO and Chairman of the Board of Majesco, a computer games company, which he left in July 2005.

He took up positions on the boards of Boston College and MIT Sloan business schools and several technology and consumer product-oriented companies.

In August, 2007, Yankowski was appointed CEO of Ambient Devices, an emerging consumer electronics company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.