Ken Michaels will step down as president and COO of Hachette Book Group at the end of the month to move into the newly created role of global chief operating officer for Macmillan Science and Education. Michaels will be based in New York and London and report to Annette Thomas, CEO of Macmillan Science and Education.
Michaels’ appointment is the latest in a series of moves made by Macmillan Science and Education since it was formed a year ago to unite all of Macmillan’s scientific, scholarly, academic and education businesses. Among the changes made over the last 12 months are: combining Palgrave Macmillan and Nature Publishing Group into one global science and scholarly group under the direction of Steven Inchcoombe; also combining Macmillan’s Language Learning, Higher Education and School businesses into a single global group, led by Simon Allen, earlier CEO of Macmillan Education; and created a unified global technology team under the leadership of CTO Stephen Devlin. In addition, Macmillan Science and Education’s digital companies, Macmillan New Ventures, Digital Science and Digital Education, will be working more closely with each other and with Thomas going forward. The company is also building a new office in central London and the first of 1,500 employees will begin moving there in November.
In his role as COO, Michaels will support this new business structure and be responsible for all of Macmillan’s Science and Education’s global operations, including legal, human resources, facilities management and supply-chain activities as well as Macmillan Science and Education global finance function, plus Macmillan UK finance shared services group. He will also create “the overarching roadmap for the transformation of all Macmillan Science and Education’s critical business systems,” the company said.
