O'Hagan gets top industry honor

The career of Malcolm O'Hagan, NEMA president for the last 14 years, was capped at NEMA's 79th Annual Meeting and Leadership Conference with his acceptance of the Bernard T. Falk Award for his many contributions to the electroindustry.

O'Hagan led the association during a time of two seismic changes in the marketplace. The first was the sudden rapid movement toward international competition in a relatively short time. The second was the emergence of the internet and the advent of electronic commerce. To meet these challenges successfully required vision, agility, and the willingness to be an agent for change. "Malcolm O'Hagan embodied all these qualities," says NEMA Chairman Randy Carson, who will present the award to O'Hagan.

To meet the considerable challenge of moving the industry toward full acceptance of electronic commerce, O'Hagan encouraged the creation of a committee to produce electronic data interchange (EDI) standards and later was instrumental in the formation of the Industry Data Warehouse and the Industry Data Exchange Association (IDEA). There were no real precedents to guide the effort, but O'Hagan's persistence and that of a number of NEMA and NAED leaders helped overcome several early obstacles that might have derailed the effort.

IDEA President Mike Rioux says, "IDEA could easily have fallen by the wayside if not for Malcolm's leadership and tenacity. He lent us NEMA's support every step of the way, through the difficult start-up years and up to the present day." As conventional and widely accepted as e-commerce is today, there were only a handful of people a dozen years ago who had the vision to see the opportunity it represented to the industry to increase productivity, decrease costs, and generally upgrade the marketing channel. Tom Naber, president of the National Association of Electrical Distributors, says "From the development of the first e-commerce standards to the creation of Industry Data Warehouse and the formation of the Industry Data Exchange Association, Malcolm was there pushing for progress."

"The commercialization of the internet," says O'Hagan, "made it apparent that both manufacturers and distributors needed to move quickly to embrace this technology and incorporate it into their business practices. As there is to most change, there was significant resistance at first, and there are even today some companies who have not joined the electronic community that IDEA has established for our industry. But we forged ahead with the help of some of NEMA's most visionary leaders and those of our partner, NAED. To not respond would have been unthinkable."

The other paradigm shift during the last decade and a half was the move from a largely domestic industry to one that is largely international. While there was again some resistance to devoting NEMA resources to international activities, O'Hagan, then Board Chairman Tom Malott of Siemens Energy & Automation, and several NEMA other board members in the mid-1990s became vocal advocates of an international program. The association developed a novel funding mechanism to accommodate those companies that wished NEMA to provide international services, while leaving untouched those that felt they weren't in need of the services.

Since then, NEMA's international activities have grown many fold and NEMA has established satellite offices in Mexico, Brazil, and most recently in China. NEMA is now providing a rich mix of services to companies doing business in all three countries, three of the largest, fastest growing markets in the world. NEMA's presence in these countries was made possible by grants from the Department of Commerce's Market Development Cooperator Program. Its success was in part due to its tenacity under O'Hagan's leadership. NEMA's first grant application failed. Undaunted, the association in the following year applied for and received the matching grant that would help fund the Mexico and Brazil offices. A few years later, NEMA would apply and receive the grant for the China office.

While the offices are a visible symbol of NEMA's involvement in international activities, the association effectively influenced international standards and trade policy during O'Hagan's entire stay. Its work with the International Electrotechnical Commission helped U.S.-based companies limit technical barriers to trade that could be embedded in standards in NEMA's absence from the table. In the last few years, NEMA has provided leadership to the IEC Standards Management Board, which oversees all IEC technical work. Not long after O'Hagan assumed the presidency of NEMA, the association established CANENA, the Council for Harmonization of Electrotechnical Standards of the Nations of the Americas. A number of important bi-national and tri-national standards have since been developed, helping facilitate commerce in North America.

O'Hagan also agreed to provide office space to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). CII is India's premier business association, with over 5,100 primary members and over 50,000 "indirect" company members that belong to nearly 300 national and regional sectoral associations.

Under O'Hagan's guidance, NEMA built a strong government relations program that has, among other things, monitored trade policy and served as a respected voice in favor of free trade and the elimination of trade barriers around the world. NEMA was an effective advocate for the North American Free Trade Agreement, and for subsequent free trade agreements in various regions of the world.

Perhaps the greatest legislative accomplishment under O'Hagan's leadership was the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, recently signed by President Bush. NEMA was successful in gaining inclusion of provisions that promote energy efficiency and conservation, energy production and supply, improved energy transmission and distribution, energy tax incentives, and new technologies that promise greater efficiency and environmental protection. The provisions not only benefit the industry, but the consumer and the greater public in the form of better electrical infrastructure, reliable power transmission, and more efficient, effective use of energy. The NEMA government relations program has earned admiration among its peers in the nation's capital and has a voice disproportionately strong in policy-making circles, given the size and budget of the association. Many contribute the success to the organization's focus on issues of specific interest to the electroindustry, leaving broader issues, like litigation reform, to sister organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

It was also O'Hagan who pushed for the growth of NEMA's statistics program into a full service economic analysis and forecasting business. NEMA/BIS has become a well-respected source of such information and is growing rapidly. O'Hagan recognized the potential for such a business and believed in the ability of NEMA/BIS personnel to run it.

The NEMA/BIS business model was not inconsistent with his approach to NEMA funding in general. NEMA remains one of the only associations which operates on a fee-for-service basis. The model is closer to the way a consulting firm bills its clients than to the traditional not-for-profit funding model. "We believe that our members should receive value in return for their dollars and that they should decide what kind of services they require," says O'Hagan. "That the model works," he says, "is illustrated by how the association fared during the last recession. Many associations were forced to lay off staff because their industries were suffering and membership dues were dropping. We avoided this pain because our members believed they were paying for services they needed and valued."

"Malcolm's entrepreneurship and his belief that NEMA members would recognize and reward value," says Carson, "really struck the right chord with our members. He took a risk and it paid off for the association and for its members."

Another risk that paid off during O'Hagan's time in office was industry funding, organized by NEMA, of a government study on the effect of electromagnetic frequencies on human health. Press reports and a number of small, epidemiological studies had created considerable public concern about exposure to high voltage power and transmission lines and other devices that emit low frequency electromagnetic fields. NEMA believed that more research needed to be done to conclude that EMF posed a risk to humans and that there was a link between it and childhood leukemia. The industry committed $2.5 million to help fund the EMF RAPID research program, the largest evaluation of EMF to that date, led by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy.

In 1999, at the conclusion of the program, NIEHS reported to the U.S. Congress that the overall scientific evidence for human health risk from EMF exposure is weak. The study said that "no consistent pattern of biological effects from exposure to EMF had emerged from laboratory studies with animals or with cells." While some epidemiology studies had indicated there might be a small increased risk, more recent reviews confirm the conclusions of the larger study.
"It was not an insignificant amount of money to raise for a study involving so much controversy," says O'Hagan in retrospect, "but we felt that it was important to base policy decisions on sound science, a principle we have applied to our approach to public policy issues as a rule."

The National Electrical Safety Foundation, now known as Electrical Safety Foundation International, was also created during O'Hagan's tenure. ESFI was founded as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) in 1994 by NEMA, Underwriters Laboratories (UL), and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). "This was a milestone in NEMA's history, "says Carson, senior vice president and group executive of Eaton Corporation. Eaton also has a seat on ESFI's board of directors. "The foundation was a necessary creation of the industry, which has gained so much from the harnessing of electrical energy," says Carson. "It is thus fitting that NEMA created a mechanism to promote the safe use of electrical safety in the home, school, and workplace. Malcolm was central to the creation of ESFI, gathering NEMA's leadership together to commit to this important public education institution." With the able leadership of people like Charlie Denny of Square D, ESFI raised an endowment of $4 million.

Hubbell Incorporated Chairman and President Tim Powers, NEMA's incoming board chairman, sums up O'Hagan's service to the industry: "Malcolm's vision, hard work, and organizational abilities combine to make him an exemplary leader. Having worked with him through some difficult times in the life of both NEMA and IDEA, I know that his dedication to the members and to NEMA's mission helped us become stronger and one of the finest trade associations in the world."

Read a summary of Malcolm O'Hagan's acceptance speech including quotes.