George Kantor Promoted to Vice President, Strategic Projects Group
I am pleased to announce that George Kantor has been promoted to Vice President, Strategic Projects Group, effective immediately, continuing to report to me.
Prior to coming to Penguin Random House, George and I worked together at Viacom/MTV Networks and in 2013, when the PRH merger was announced, I knew George would be a wonderful addition to the Strategic Projects Group. He quickly became one of our key resources for critical systems integration work and indispensable to the team. That was 11 years ago, and I would venture to say that all who know him would find it hard to imagine PRH without George.
And so many of you do know him! George has managed a wide variety of projects across the organization, interacting not only with those of you in Operations, but also in all our corporate groups and across publishing divisions. I cannot count the number of times one of our colleagues has reached out to me to say what an incredible partner George has been and how thrilled they’ve been to have George as a collaborator in driving initiatives both large and small.
Some of George’s key projects include acquisitions: Boxcar Children for Random House Children’s Books, Rebel Girls and Phonic Books for DK, and F+W for Penguin. In all of them, George endeavored successfully to streamline the sometimes unique, sometimes complex paths to unlocking the benefits for our publishing group, a critical component to our company’s growth strategy.
George was also a key contributor and the project manager for onboarding Marvel—our first comic client—and integrating over 2,000 direct market customers. This was a large scale, multi-stakeholder and multi-year strategic effort that required substantial change across some PRH functions. George was involved from the start; helping to demonstrate PRH’s value to Marvel and driving strategic decision-making sessions that would define PRH’s comics business as it is today.
Another direct market initiative that George has been managing brilliantly is the .biz project, which has resulted in a platform for our Indie, Special Market, and Direct Market customers that has been hailed as an industry best. Additionally, the PRH teams involved have gained a repeatable process to balance user needs and PRH goals in large-scale software implementations. In all he does, George is constantly refining processes and building efficiencies, fine-tuning how he collaborates with teams internally. All these efforts, in concert with the same mindset of all our Operations colleagues, contribute to our continued evolution as a high-performance team.
Lastly, something that I enjoy working with George on is the health and maintenance of the Strategic Projects Tracker. George helps identify risks and conflicts and the best possible sequence of projects for focused delivery. He contributes to this critical part of our process as we help ensure that the PRH Operations group drives change successfully while balancing our many priorities.
Please join me in congratulating George on his well-deserved promotion.
Alyssa Awe
Senior Vice President, Strategic Operations & Projects
Publisher, Zeitgeist