Bill Burns Transcript
Clint Betts
Welcome to the CEO.com Show. My name is Clint Betts. On today's show, today's episode, I talked to Bill Burns, the CEO of Zebra Technologies. We had a really interesting conversation. In particular, his thoughts on AI are worth honing in on this episode, how artificial intelligence is transforming his business, both internally and externally, customer-facing marketing, the way he's building products, the way he's thinking about building products in the future. I thought that part of the conversation was really interesting. He also talked a lot about the current macroeconomic environment and where things stand with us being in two wars, interest rates staying up, and all of those types of things. I think the whole conversation was fantastic. Obviously, Bill is a very experienced leader. He's had over 30 years of experience, has been the CEO of a number of companies, and has an MBA from Temple University. I mean, this is somebody you want to listen to. So here you go. Here's my conversation with Bill Burns.
Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show. It means a lot to have you on. I know you're super busy. Tell us about Zebra and how you became the CEO of this company.
Bill Burns
Yeah, thanks for having us, or myself. It's great to be here. Zebra empowers the on-demand economy. So think of the idea that consumers and businesses want everything in an expedited fashion these days as fast as they can get them. So they want goods manufactured and delivered to them closer and closer to where they're located. That drives this idea of enterprise asset intelligence that Zebra delivers, which is really the idea that every asset and worker is visible, connected, and optimally utilized. And what that really means in a nutshell is that, ultimately, we have hardware, software, services, and solutions that are seen in everyday life. So think of barcodes, readers at the front of checkout in a supermarket. Think of the devices used when a parcel is being delivered to your home: a mobile device that scans that package. Think of an RFID reader, an electronic tag on inventory that's in a retail store that's then used during checkout to say you actually bought that individual item. Hospital wristbands. So, think of wristbands at a hospital that are used to identify a patient or a label that identifies a specimen. Most recently, we've entered some new areas around robotics, machine vision, and retail software, which we can talk more about. My experience, I have about 30 years of experience, more than 30 years of experience in the telecommunications and technology industries. Joined Zebra eight, nine years ago now. Led the organization over the last year as CEO after joining them after they did a large acquisition. So Zebra was focused really on the specialty printing area of their business, and they acquired an enterprise business unit from Motorola, which took the company from about a billion dollars to three and a half billion. And I joined initially to lead the business units and the new acquisition.
Clint Betts
What do you think the growth of the on-demand economy will be in the future? Because obviously it's grown exponentially over the past decade and beyond and more than a decade. What is the future of it? I mean, how does it... I mean, I can't imagine it slowing down.
Bill Burns
Yeah, expectations haven't got any easier, right? I think that everybody expects to have more and more visibility of goods and services that they've ordered or need or want delivered in a fashion where they get them faster. And if they're not going to get them faster, what's the visibility of when they're going to get them? So think of goods, think of retail apparel being at the point of being manufactured is tagged with electronic tag these days for specific specialty retailers. Then that electronic tag is used through the supply chain process all the way through a distribution center for individual retail stores and then is used in the store to actually tell what items are actually in stock or what do they have in the back room or where do they have it in the stock. It's also used to pick orders in the store. And then it's actually, that tag upon checkout says, "Okay, that blue blouse was actually sold through my point of checkout," so I know it was actually sold. It wasn't stolen or taken in some other way. So now, if a customer returns it, I know it's actually been purchased. So, all the way from the manufacturer all the way through is a great example of the on-demand economy where there's more visibility through the entire supply chain using electronic RFID tagging. That's a demand that consumers or businesses have today to say, "I want that visibility. So if I can't get it immediately, and that's how I expect it today, then I want to know when I am going to get it. And how could you track and trace through the entire supply chain to tell me when I'm really going to get it."
Clint Betts
What kind of experience at Zebra do you hope your customers have of you, the company, and the whole cycle of being a customer of yours? What type of experience are you trying to deliver?
Bill Burns
Yeah, I mean, we think... One of our values is to put the customer first, right? It's the idea of focusing on the customer. And customers for Zebra are actually twofold interesting enough. We sell about 80-plus percent of what we sell to our end customers, which are retail, transportation logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and government, which are our largest customers. But we sell to about 80% of those through our channel partners. Many times, it's two-tier distribution, meaning we sell to the distributor, the distributor sells to a partner of Zebra's, and then ultimately, they sell the end product to our end customers. So we think of customers in many different ways, meaning the very end customer that actually ultimately drives demand for our products are partners that put together solutions, software, hardware, and multifaceted solutions for our customers as our partner community. And we have about 10,000 of those around the world. Then, our distributors, who stock our products, allow them to be easily distributed and give credit to our partners and others to do commercial business with the end customers. So we think of partners or customers as being all tiers of that, and ultimately, they've got to come first in everything we do. We talk internally about the idea that it truly takes a village. It takes everybody in the company to continue to focus on the customer to make that experience right, whether that's from first placing an order or a quotation early in the process all the way through customer service at the end if there's a problem with the product. So we think of it as how do you always put the customer first? And for us, customer really means distributor partner and end customer.
Clint Betts
With so many different facets and areas of your business, how do you decide where to spend your time each day?
Bill Burns
Yeah, I think when I took over as CEO about a year-plus ago, I laid out three critical objectives. First is what we just talked about staying close to our customers and our partners, right? Making sure that, ultimately, we remain focused on them. Second, how do we drive growth across the business, and what are the areas that are going to be most impactful across our business? One of the values we talked about in the exercise is the blue chips, right? There are blue chips and white chips, and ultimately, the blues are more valuable in the exercise. How do you focus on the areas that are most important to drive growth across the business? Third, and probably one of the most important of all, is having a strong culture and having the right talent across the organization. So, I think my priorities are really being customer and partner-focused. How do we drive growth across the business and focus on the areas that matter most? And ultimately, how do we have the best and brightest talent around the world, either attracting them or retaining them, and making sure we've got a great strong culture across the world and across the globe that allows us to fulfill the first two, how do we fulfill our needs to our customers and how do we drive growth?
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you in particular? Do you have any habits or routines that you like to stick to in order to stay motivated, stay fresh, and be able to solve these problems each day?
Bill Burns
Yeah, I wouldn't say habits as much as I travel a lot, ultimately. So you want to make sure you're organized certainly to do that. But my day consists of working with our customers or partners, internal meetings, and others to make sure we're fulfilling the needs of our customers, and then ultimately staying focused on our internal teams and continuing to grow those teams internally. So I would say more than anything else, remaining organized with how much travel I do around the world, and then ultimately, each day is filled with a calendar of items that, again chasing the blue chips as we talked about before, what are those most important things we need to have to go do? I think a lot of times we talk as CEOs about, "Hey, what are the things in our calendar that someone else can do? What is the time on our calendar that only we could do?" And I think that's a good question to ask sometimes to say, "Hey, can someone else handle this meeting? Should this be handed off to someone else on the leadership team who can handle it? Do I really need to be involved ultimately?" And I think you've got to be comfortable the more senior you become in the organization of becoming less involved some of the things that ultimately don't take your involvement and trust your leaders within the organization to empower them to make sure that the job gets done below you.
Clint Betts
What do you read? Do you have any reading recommendations for us?
Bill Burns
Yeah, I literally keep up with current events each and every day, right? I think it's important that whether it's not just financial, it's what's happening around the world, especially in the geopolitical challenges we're facing today, the wars across the world, and just what's happening. I use multiple news sources these days. It's hard to read a news source that's not editorial versus news, but you pull out the nuggets associated with that. So, every day, I look at what's happening across the world, and not just around financials or business, but really around what's happening across the globe. I've read a good book by McKinsey around CEO excellence over the last year or so. I thought that was a good book about six focus areas for CEOs, including everything from how to maintain strong relationships with your board. How do you continue to drive the right things? How do you stay focused on the customer? So I think that that's a good book for other CEOs. It was a lot of research done by McKinsey, about 200 CEOs ultimately, and saying, "Hey, what really drives excellence across in a CEO role, and what's the most important things that CEOs are going to focus on?" But I'd say each and every day it's really keeping up on current events and really whether it's The New York Times or just news feeds or others, I think it's important all of us pay attention to what's happening around the globe, big and small.
Clint Betts
Do you think that's a relatively new phenomenon, this idea that CEOs and leaders of companies have to focus on and learn and understand more about what's happening in the world than maybe 20 years ago you had to focus particularly on your business, or you could kind of tune all that stuff out and plug in directly to what you're doing as a leader and directly into what your company is doing? But it seems like those days are over if they ever existed, and CEOs are now required to know what's happening in the world.
Bill Burns
Yeah, I think that... This is one of the things that the McKinsey book actually touches on, the role of a CEO or a senior leader, quite honestly, in any organization. It's not only the CEO, right? There's more and more demands across the leadership roles within the largest companies around the world about what's happening outside the company, whether that's social issues, whether that's inclusion and diversity, whether that's geopolitical overall or what's happening, the impacts of foreign trade and others on our businesses. So I think the demands are greater than ever, and I think that the consequences of not getting it right are also much larger these days with social media, that a single comment can be taken the wrong way by any leader, not just the CEO, and ultimately be amplified very, very quickly across social media. So, I think the demands are much broader than just running a business. And I think it was much different than that. And I don't know how many years ago you want to say that was, but ultimately, the demands have changed and are much more broad and widespread in public actions for any leader in a large-size business.
Clint Betts
Given how technical of a company Zebra is, I wonder how artificial intelligence is shaping your company, shaping your thinking, and how you're thinking about it as CEO of Zebra?
Bill Burns
Yeah, we think about it as one of our largest divisions, which is rugged mobile devices with scan engines being used at this point of productivity. So, think of a postal worker delivering a parcel to your house, or think of e-commerce delivery with transportation logistics. Think of the device in the hands of a retail associate inside any type of retailer around the world. Think of that same device being used in a warehouse environment when picking orders for E-commerce or inside a manufacturer or production facility. Think of tablets in that same area with a larger screen but filling information into, say, a production line, somebody working on a production line these days. So the idea of having a mobile device in your hand, a mobile device or a tablet, is the idea that gives you the opportunity to have some type of AI assistant, and that's how we see it is that there are two demands for AI inside Zebra. One is internally: where do you become more effective and more efficient in your business in everything we do across marketing, code writing, all those things that people talk about how genitive AI can help make a business more effective and more efficient? The other areas we think about is that how do we leverage AI in generative AI? So traditional AI techniques we've used for many years inside our products. So robots use them to map areas to be able to autonomous mobile robots to move around and not run into things. We use AI techniques to learn things like vision systems to be able to see if a label is on straight during manufacturing if a bottle is filled to the right level, and if the parts and the components are in the right spot. So that's using vision systems in machine learning forms of artificial intelligence. Think of forecasting. So we impact forecasting inside retailers by taking past data, running them through an AI algorithm, and ultimately saying, "How should I forecast?" We use it in scheduling. So think if I scheduled you to work every Thursday and every time I schedule on Thursday, you move it to Friday." Well, the algorithm learns not to schedule you on Thursday anymore. That's all artificial intelligence and learning, machine learning. So we've used that for many years. I think what's new is this generative AI model and the idea that you can interact in a text or a voice way to get assistance without really knowing, ultimately, all the aspects of the question. So, if you are an example I used to use, like to use, if you're a produce manager, it was brand new in a supermarket and ultimately, on a holiday weekend, you run out of strawberries, what do you do? So you basically say to the device, "Hey, what do I do when I'm out of strawberries?" And you get the guidance of either the operating principles of the supermarket, what to go do factually, reorder the strawberries, do those things, or you can get the coaching and guidance of the most experienced produce manager in the chain that ultimately says, "Okay, move the blueberries and raspberries closer together so it doesn't look like there's a gap. Move all the strawberries you do have from three different areas within produce to all one area, so it doesn't look like you've only got a couple of units left. You put them all together in a specific area." "Hey, put a rush order in. Don't just order one. Make a call to the produce manager back in your distribution center to get a rush order delivered the next morning so you have them." So you can take your newest employee, in this case, a new produce manager inside a supermarket and make them as good as your best employer, or at least have them a coach or an assistant or a co-pilot available to them by running a genitive AI model on the actual mobile device itself. They do not necessarily have to go back to the cloud, but they have it at their fingertips. So it could be the operating procedures, or it could be advice from other players or members of their team. How do I make the newest employee as good as my best employee? And by using it in plain text or plain language because that's what genitive AI gives us. In the past, we've had traditional AI and vision systems that have machine learning. What genitive AI gives us is simple text and simple language, and giving you the answer in simple text and language by learning and teaching it on specific data is really the key. And if our customers can go do that, this idea of co-pilot or assistance, we think, plays into retail, plays into manufacturing. What happens when this production process goes out of alignment? What do I do? And that newest production line person watching that line, ultimately responsible for it, can have an assistant talking to them right at their fingertips. So I think that's really the key is we see it from a customer offering perspective, is kind of next generation to what we can go do then compared to what we're doing today.
Clint Betts
Where has it been most useful so far internally, particularly around where have you found it to really, really help with efficiency?
Bill Burns
Yeah, our marketing teams today are around marketing campaigns, and others have used generative AI. We've used it internally around being able to... Our customer support teams and others have been able to gather information and use the large language models ultimately to answer questions for our customers, those kinds of things. We're seeing that there are clear benefits to faster code writing. So a lot of what we do about... A large portion of our engineers are software engineers versus hardware, and they're seeing benefits in early trials within the company as well. So I think we're going to see efficiencies. I think ultimately, what it creates, though, is that it makes employees more efficient, but it doesn't necessarily take their jobs away because somebody still needs to guide the AI model. Someone still needs to say, "I want that ad campaign across Japan, China, and Australia. Come up with images for me." So it makes their job more efficient as opposed to just searching images, but they ultimately have to make the decision of what image to make. The coder still needs to check the code. They can't just trust that. "Hey, I just used an AI model to basically write code for me, and it's all good, and I'm going to submit it." Somebody needs to check that code. So it makes them more efficient for mundane kinds of tasks and then ultimately allows them to spend their time on things that add the most value.
Clint Betts
How have you been thinking about this whole work from home, hybrid, or everybody in the office debate? How have you handled that at Zebra?
Bill Burns
Yeah, so I mean, I would say we're office-centric, but we're in a hybrid environment or hybrid work environment, meaning that we've got to encourage our employees to come to work in indoor offices on a regular basis. Typically, three days a week, we like to see them in the office. Depending on the location, you see more or less of that. But about three days everywhere is what we've said to employees we'd like to see really around communication, collaboration, and teams getting together across the business to continue to drive things like innovation across our business. And it's really worked. I think that people have always a lot of flexibility at Zebra to work from home when they needed to or head out early because they've got someone coming to the house for a meeting or others, or they've got late-night calls with Asia because we're truly a global company. So they've always had the flexibility. I think we've made it more explicit now in a hybrid environment. We have some remote employees, too, for whom we've decided that certain roles could be remote. They don't have to be in the same offices as the rest of our teams. But we typically are more office-centric, meaning people live within proximity to the office, and we encourage them to come in three times a week. Other times, when it's okay to work from home or from the office, they make the choice depending on the teams, what's happening, and how much collaboration they need. Some employees are in five days a week; others are in three days a week, and others are fully remote. So I would say office-centric, hybrid approach is what we've really taken, and I think it's worked. It's giving employees the flexibility they need and allowing us to hire the right talent if they don't have to be in a specific location, so we can hire someone who's remote. But we have to make a choice for each job requisition. We hire somebody new, say, "Where does that job need to be, and do we need to be more collaboration, less corroboration? Can it be done kind of on their own?" And we make a conscious decision around that.
Clint Betts
How do you define culture?
Bill Burns
Boy, we have to think of culture as being a critical aspect to success of any business, including ours. And that's been a really important piece of our business. We brought two businesses together, the Zebra billion dollars, specialty printing business bought a two and a half billion-dollar business unit from Motorola. So it became a three and a half billion-dollar organization in November of 2014. We believe we need to bring two cultures together, kind of as one Zebra, the Zebra nation, and we went through a whole cultural training across the organization of what that ultimately means. We put in place a vision statement of values underneath that. So that's eight years ago now, nine years ago. So now, most recently, we've refreshed our values, and we've put in place a new purpose statement because we see those as being explicit ways to describe to our employees what Zebra is really all about and what we deliver to our customers. So, our purpose statement, then our vision statement we talked about before, is, what does Zebra really do? Then, ultimately, our values of how we go do it. But we see a strong culture around the world at Zebra, really where employees truly care about each other, care about what you did on the weekend and what's happening across your family, and we see that as an important element to our success ultimately.
Clint Betts
What is Zebra's purpose statement?
Bill Burns
Yeah, our purpose statement is that it's brand new. We create new ways of working that make everyday life better for organizations, their employees, and those they serve. So, think of it as being when we create new ways of working by automating processes, giving visibility, digitizing, and automating environments. And that ultimately allows us to make everyday life better for organizations that ultimately we sell to, their individual employees because they're using our physical mobile devices, scanners, printers in their work, and those they serve their customers. So, think of Zebra as digitizing and automating these environments. If I can give everything a digital voice if I can give a forklift a digital voice if I can give a pallet of goods a digital voice if I can give an individual blue blouse a digital voice. If you can see, read a barcode or read an electronic tag and know where that asset is or that it's in a specific area, or ultimately a tool where it is when I need to go use it, or an IV pump in a hospital, or that I got the right patient. If I can identify things, digitize them, and give them a digital voice, then I can automate those processes. I can tell the forklift what the next best move is to go pick out freight. I can tell a worker where the tool is to go get it or where the IV pump is in a hospital. I can ensure that the right patient gets the right medicine within the hospital. So we think of impacting everyday lives by digitizing and automating customers environments, which creates new ways of working this automation that allows everyday life to get better, or ultimately organizations that we serve, their employees because their job becomes more effective, more efficient, and more secure in the case of protecting things like patients. The ultimate patient has a better outcome, the shopper has a better outcome, the freight is delivered on time, and the manufacturer gets the goods to the right person at the right time. All those things allow them to serve their end customers in a better way.
Clint Betts
What does being a leader mean to you? I imagine, as I hear you, as you talk, and man, it's probably incredible to work for you, I wonder... Obviously, part of a leader's job is to produce outcomes, like you just said, and produce really great outcomes for your customers and employees and all of that. But what does it mean to you?
Bill Burns
I think that leadership ultimately means that we've got to be looking at ourselves each and every day and saying, "Hey, are we doing the right things across the business?" Ultimately, we've got our customers that we need to focus on. We've got our employees who have to have a great experience working for Zebra to deliver for those customers. And then we've got our shareholders. So kind of the three legs of a stool ultimately interconnected. And as a leader, I think you've got to balance all of those as a leadership team, not just me, but my leadership team, and then the level leaders below them and cascading throughout the whole organization and saying, "Ultimately, what do we need to do to best serve our customers, drive the growth of Zebra?" And if we do that, that creates opportunities for our employees. If we're growing, if we're serving our customers in the right way, if we have the right products and solutions that our customers want to buy, our employees will be rewarded as well. We'll hire new employees. They'll grow their careers. They'll get paid bonuses, and the stock will go up. All those things are rewards to our employees. And then, ultimately, our shareholders get rewarded as well because our financial results are better, our employees are more engaged in serving our customers, and it kind of all ties together. So, I think the role of me or others as leaders is ultimately to continue to stay focused on the customer. We drive growth across the business while at the same time maintaining a strong focus on culture, talent, and our employees, making sure they're engaged to deliver on our brand promise ultimately to our end customers. And then, ultimately, our shareholders get rewarded through that. They see financial results and strong financial results for investing in Zebra, and I think that's important for them. So, the three legs of the stool are all really important to focus on as a leader.
Clint Betts
Who's a leader or an example of a leader that you admire?
Bill Burns
Boy, I think the thing I like most is that I'm always impressed with people who start their own businesses. When someone who's an entrepreneur starts their own business, the founder, and sells their business, everybody's like, "Wow, look how much they made on that business." But everybody forgets all the challenges they faced along the way, that early on in that business, they self-funded it. They took out a double mortgage; they didn't pay themselves a salary, and their spouse went out to work to pay the bills in the family. They gave themselves very little while they were trying to pay their employees along the way. They went through hardships to where they thought at times they couldn't make payroll, or they're waiting for that next order or all those things to take a small business or a founder business or a family-led business and make it into a larger business. They're the folks that I always admire most. I love to hear those stories from folks who have started or founded a business. And actually, we look at things like Silicon Valley and venture-funded businesses where someone's spending someone else's money. I'm not saying it's any easier, but it's not quite as risk-taking as someone who says, "I'm going to take a mortgage out of my house to go fund my business and grow it from nothing with my own dollars and ultimately make it a profitable, successful business." So I'm always admired with those folks.
Clint Betts
Oh yeah, that's a completely different level of entrepreneurship. I mean, venture capital is just like, "Hey, we didn't provide a return. Good luck on the other companies." Like, "Hey, you don't succeed here. You lose your house."
Bill Burns
That's right. [inaudible 00:29:30].
Clint Betts
The consequences are pretty different there. It's pretty fascinating.
Bill Burns
Risk-taking is much larger.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, for sure. We talked about this at the beginning, but I wonder what are your current thoughts on the current macroeconomic environment. The year we're in, obviously, we're in election year in the United States, but there's elections all across the country. We're in two wars, at least. What is your current feeling about where we're at today?
Bill Burns
I would say it's still a bit challenging, right? Ultimately, I think that we were hoping for everyone's interest rates to come down, and inflation has been more stubborn than anybody just thought. I think that, ultimately, the challenges around the world you described are due to two wars taking place today in the Middle East and in Russia and Ukraine. I think that, ultimately, the job market has remained strong globally, which has been good. I think we've seen a shift from through COVID a goods-based economy to really a service-based economy. Meaning that I think that individuals and families are traveling more and spending money in those areas, but ultimately, I think they're paying more for it because there's more demand for it. I think that they spend a lot of money on their homes and on goods during COVID, and now they're spending it on services, whether it's sports events or whether it's travel or others, but I think in an inflated way. I think the economy will move back towards the balance between goods and services. I think interest rates have come down a bit, ultimately easing pressure on credit and others. And I think we're on the right path. I think ultimately we're probably not in for a hard recession at this point or others, but I think ultimately it's going to be a bit of... I think there are a lot of comparisons happening from through COVID, after COVID, and then ultimately, as things open back up, I think there was an expectation for certain markets; China is an example, to be stronger coming out of COVID. We haven't seen that. We're still seeing different kinds of comparisons because supply wasn't available, but then it is available, and it's not available again. I think people are still trying to find their way on what it really means after COVID here from an economic perspective and with all the challenges around the world. So I would say mixed. I would say it is still challenging, but I think that it is moving in the right direction, which is what most would say. In our business, we've seen some green shoots across the business. We saw really run up in revenue very high during COVID, kind of a reset to more normalized growth rates in 2023, and now we're seeing green shoots of more opportunities moving forward, more of our customers looking to buy our solutions from us. I think we're seeing some positive signs, and I think that's driven by the macro environment behind us.
Clint Betts
By the way, I think that's spot on. I think your assessment there sounds probably the most reasonable of a lot that we're hearing right now. Finally, we end every interview the exact same way, and that is at CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. And I wonder when you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Bill Burns
The first thing I think of is because we're going through this right now with our early careers and interns in a program here at Zebra, but I spend time speaking to our interns, and I always tell them to make the most of that environment. Ultimately, I think that the person who took the most risk on me, and anyone who is an individual in the workforce, is probably your first job. And so I come back to internships, and how you make the most of internships and learning and leveraging those into your first opportunity, whether that's here at Zebra or somewhere else, is what I always tell our interns. So I think ultimately the biggest risk or opportunity someone gives someone is quite honestly their first job in a career. Because really, they've maybe been through an internship or two along with being in college, but they don't have the skills the business is really looking for, and they've got a lot to learn. But boy, you see new grads come into a business, and they absorb lots of information very quickly. They're so eager to learn coming out of that environment. And I think giving them the opportunity, both as interns and then new hires, is a great way to continue to bring talent into the organization, into any organization. And we're really focused on it here at Zebra. But I think that's probably the biggest risk I think of is our opportunity I was given at Tellabs, which was really my first job opportunity with them, and I think that's probably the case for most people.
Clint Betts
Bill, thank you so much for coming on. Congratulations on all your success. Seriously, what an honor to have you.
Bill Burns
Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. It was great. It was great to spend the time together. Thank you.