Carl J. Yankowski (born 1948) is an American businessman who is the former CEO of Palm, Inc. and Ambient Devices. Early life Yankowski attended Butler Senior High School in Butler, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1966. He gained simultaneous degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also took a humanities minor in Art History at Wellesley College, as one of the first men to attend. Early career Upon graduation he worked as a systems analyst for Procter & Gamble but discovered that he enjoyed leveraging both marketing and technology. He developed new products and promotional campaigns for Pringles and Duncan Hines mixes. He then moved to Memorex where he helped develop the first high-performance cassette tapes, and with Ella Fitzgerald worked on the "Is It Live Or Is It Memorex" campaign before joining Pepsi, expanding Mountain Dew, launching 2L plastic bottles and back-lit vending machines, and working on the three-year Pepsi Challenge campaign for PepsiCo, beating Coke in market share for the first consistent time. At General Electric, he helped develop the Spacemaker range with its "We Bring Good Things to Life" campaign. He then worked in the U.S. and London as divisional CEO of Cadbury Schweppes, focused on new soft drink delivery systems. Polaroid Yankowski joined Polaroid Corporation in 1988 as a corporate vice president with initial responsibility for all business imaging, U.S. consumer and industrial marketing before moving to Hong Kong as group vice president for the corporation's Asia/Pacific region. He then returned to the United States to become the president and chief operating officer of Sony Electronics in November 1993, almost doubling the U.S. businesses by $5 billion, and launching PlayStation, VAIO, CDMA phones, and DVD, as well as Direct TV, Web TV, and others. Yankowski left Sony in January 1998 "to address immediate family health issues" (his father was dying). He became president and chief executive officer of the Reebok Brand in September 1998, initiating cost-cutting and a turnaround, as well as a re-focus on women and fitness. Palm Yankowski joined 3Com to head its Palm division on 13 December 1999. In his first year at Palm, he became chief executive officer, transforming the division of 3Com into a public company with a billion-dollar+ IPO and market capitalization of US$30 billion. Yankowski gained notoriety for his appearance on a CNBC interview on the day of