Incoming ASIS president has broad industry perspective

SANTA ANA, Calif.—Geoffrey T. Craighead, CPP, will take the helm at ASIS in January, anticipating a seamless transition to the presidency of the 38,000-member association, which in recent years has put an emphasis on security directors.

Craighead, who has served in ASIS leadership roles for the past 14 years, is vice president of California-based Universal Protection Service, which offers guard services for facilities ranging from airports to health care and retail. He succeeds Eduard J. Emde, CPP, who will become chairman of the ASIS board of directors. Emde specializes in security and security risk management as principal consultant for BMKISS Europe, an independent security support organization based in the Netherlands. Although Craighead’s background differs, coming from the contract security sector, he told Security Director News that will have no impact on the focus of ASIS.

“Believe it or not, I don’t see it all that differently, because serving on the ASIS board of directors we have a common focus, which is implementing the objectives of the society, and we’re all so in tune with the way the society is reaching out to its members,” he said. “So it’s almost like when we come in to serve in that capacity, we basically park our credentials at door and focus on the task at hand.”

Craighead’s resume lists him as an expert in security operations and crisis management for corporate campus and commercial high-rises, as a published author and qualified expert witness in high-rise security, fire-life safety and emergency planning.
 
“Sure, I come from the contract security side, but I have had the luxury and honor of working with integrators and CSOs” through ASIS, he said. “I got to learn their businesses, and I consider myself very fortunate. In ASIS terms, that gives me a very broad prospective of what’s going on in the industry.”

Australian by birth, Craighead has worked in the United States for 30 years and in Hong Kong for five years. “Like Eduard I do have the perspective of coming from outside the U.S.,” he said, noting that Emde was the first president of ASIS to come from outside of the Unites States, “which was a major statement in regards to the international community focus that ASIS takes very seriously.”

ASIS established its CSO Roundtable in 2008 in a deliberate step, Craighead said, to reach out to high-ranking security officials and assist them in their work. There are now 333 CSO members from 28 countries—“a select group of people who control a lot of the critical infrastructure within the countries they serve.” “I consider that a major accomplishment over four years. These are important people,” he said.

ASIS will continue to serve security directors through networking opportunities, by providing timely information and by supplying consensus-made standards and guidelines, he said.

“We will keep on providing what I really see as some of the major highlights of what it means to be an ASIS member—networking and CSO roundtables. They have also expressed a desire to have a protected environment where they can present themselves openly,” he said.

Both Craighead and Emde will serve on the Board Management Committee of the Board of Directors, joining Richard E. Widup Jr., senior director of corporate security at Purdue Pharma; Dave N. Tyson, vice president of Tyson Security Risk Advisory; and David C. Davis, senior manager at Northrop Grumman.

Two new members were elected to serve on the ASIS board of directors for 2013-2015: Richard E. Chase, CSO of General Atomics, and Thomas J. Langer, vice president of security for BAE Systems. Joseph H. McDonald, CSO of Switch Communications Group, was also re-elected to a second term on the board.