Deere & Company has announced that Alec McKee will be taking up a new position as vice president, worldwide marketing in the company’s agricultural division, based in the USA at Lenexa, near Kansas City.
He is being replaced at John Deere Limited by Clay Sherrill, who is currently sales branch manager of the Minneapolis branch in the USA. The appointments are effective from 1st February 2001.
“I have had 28 very happy years working for John Deere Limited, the last eight as managing director,” said Alec McKee. “A major part of my new responsibility will be to ensure that we have the right products to meet our ever changing customer needs, and to provide increased customer and market development support on a global scale.”
After gaining an NDA from Harper Adams Agricultural College in 1967 and an NDAgrE from Writtle College of Agriculture in 1968, Alec McKee worked for four years with a John Deere distributor in Zambia. He joined John Deere Limited in 1972 as a trainee territory manager, becoming a territory manager in 1973, business management adviser in 1974, credit manager in 1975 and commercial manager in 1979. He was subsequently appointed general sales manager in 1991, and became managing director of John Deere Limited in February 1993. Alec is a past president of the Agricultural Engineers Association.
Clay Sherrill is a graduate of Wofford College and gained an MBA from Georgia State University before joining Deere & Company in 1977. He held a variety of marketing roles in different North American sales branches before becoming Minneapolis sales branch manager in 1998.
“I am looking forward to learning about the business in the UK and Ireland, and to settling my family here in the next few months,” said Clay Sherrill, who is married with two children. “Europe is more advanced in some ways than the USA, particularly with regard to more intensive use of machinery and the highly competitive nature of the marketplace – it promises to be an exciting challenge.”
John Deere Limited www.johndeere.co.uk