HRExaminer Radio is a weekly show devoted to Recruiting and Recruiting Technology airing live on Friday’s at 11AM Pacific
HRExaminer Radio
Guest: Bill Kutik, Host of “Firing Line with Bill Kutik”
Episode: 145
Air Date: January 22, 2016
As the HR industry’s leading independent analyst, Bill Kutik is considered one of the top influencers in the HR technology marketplace with specialties in SaaS, HCM, Recruiting, Workforce and Talent Management, social and mobile media, and Predictive Analytics.
In 2015, he started Firing Line with Bill Kutik®, a new HD broadcast-quality video interview program featuring thought-leaders from the HR technology community: including practitioners, vendor executives, analysts and consultants. Though sponsored, the shows focus exclusively on what guests are thinking and doing, not what they’re selling or the software they’re using.
For 25 years, he has been Technology Columnist for Human Resource Executive®, also serving as founding co-chair of the magazine’s famous annual conference, HR Technology® Conference & Exhibition, since it began in 1998 until 2013. In 2008, he started The Bill Kutik Radio Show®, a bi-weekly online talk show with industry leaders and 182 programs in the archive. He has also created and moderated 103 industry panels.
In 2012, Human Resource Executive named him one of the 10 “Most Powerful HR Technology Experts” and The Huffington Post in 2013 listed him in “Top 100 Social HR Experts on Twitter.”
He has a BA degree from Harvard University and is president of Kutik Communications, a strategy, marketing and editorial consulting firm in Westport, CT, where he can be reached at bkutik@earthlink.net.
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Transcript
Begin transcript
| John Sumser: | Good morning and welcome to HR Examiner Radio, I’m your host John Sumser. Today we’re coming to you from beautiful downtown Occidental, California where we’re getting as much rain as the East Coast is getting snow today. We’re talking with Bill Kutik who’s the host of Firing Line with Bill Kutik and an industry legend today. How are you Bill?
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| Bill Kutik: | I’m great John and my weather forecast changes every five hours between snow flurries and two feet of snow. And, it hasn’t reached us yet, it’s down in the Mid-Atlantic states so, it’ll be interesting to see. I just had my driveway re-graveled and I’m looking forward to the snow plow guy scraping all the gravel off it and dumping it in front of my garage when he comes through and moves the snow.
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| John Sumser: | Welcome to the snow, this is going to be a big one I bet. Why don’t you introduce yourself, there may actually be people listening who don’t know who you are, so if you would take a moment.
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| Bill Kutik: | Happy to, John I never assume that people know who I am. I may be arrogant in some things but never in that. I have been an independent analyst of HR technology for 26 years and during that time I’ve probably written 300 columns on the subject for human resource executive. I think the last, well not the last, one of the two last remaining print magazines, although I write for their HRE online now, I’m the father of the HR technology conference, which I started and left after 16 years in 2013. I’ve moderated 108 panels in the last 20 years, both live and online and I continue doing that next time in April at the new HR Tech China and every year for Workday’s annual live webcast Predict and Prepare, which is in December and can be seen in Replay Now.
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| I was the host of the Bill Kutik radio show that you were on and I have 183 about 20 minute podcast interview still in the archive. Unfortunately, our attention span has now shrunk to smaller than that, I’m told. I started what was once the wonderful LinkedIn group for HR technology which LinkedIn recently destroyed by changing the user interface. As you just said, I’m now currently the host of the broadcast quality video series, Firing Line with Bill Kutik. That appears on YouTube.
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| John Sumser: | Help me understand what you do and what a typical day looks like.
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| Bill Kutik: | Well, you had originally asked me for a funny story and I actually have one. I thought I’d tell it to you.
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| John Sumser: | Oh, good. Please do.
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| Bill Kutik: | I got into this field in 1989, when I was hired to edit a glossy, four color magazine called Computers and HR management, which was the first publication ever devoted to this subject. Except for the then, [inaudible 00:03:41] magazine. An executive at the publishing company had put together an advisory board before I got there but little else. At the time, I thought HR meant Home Run. I was literally, completely ignorant about what HR did. I faced the classic journalist dilemma, how do I learn about this enormous new area? Do I attend lots of conferences, read boring books, talk to dozens of people. Or, instead, do I invest my time finding the smart Jewish woman who all ready knows everything about it and convince her to explain it to me? Literally, the next day after I had that thought, a chirpy voice on the phone said, “Hi, I’m Naomi Lee Bloom. I’m on your Board of advisors so I’m calling to advise you.” That was the first of literally, 4,000 phone calls that she and I have had in the years since. She’s my oldest industry friend.
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| John Sumser: | Wow.
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| Bill Kutik: | That’s a chuckle.
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| John Sumser: | That is a chuckle. That is a chuckle. You’ve known Naomi since the very beginning. That’s an amazing thing.
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| Bill Kutik: | My very beginning. Her very beginning was long before that but yeah, that was my very beginning.
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| John Sumser: | What do you do? You’re a legend and what I’m really interested in what a legend’s Day looks like.
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| Bill Kutik: | It’s funny that word legend. A, it connotes the fact that I’m really old. Which I guess I am. 2, the amazing thing is when I’m out and about and I meet somebody who’s like 24 or 25 and I mention my name, they actually use the word. They say, “Oh, I’ve met the legend.” That’s the word they use for American Sniper. If you’ve seen the movie and that they always refer to him as the Legend and they talk about the 175 people he’s killed. Anyway.
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| I work at home, as you know. My typical day is waking up at 7 am, making coffee, sitting at the computer and not having time often to get up to shower or eat before 2pm. Knowing that you might ask this question, I counted yesterday’s emails, and discovered I’d written 50. I’m very verbose, as you know, and being a writer, I edit them two or three times before I send them out. That takes an enormous amount of time.
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| What were they about? Their content ranges from nailing down two panelists for this thing in China, responding to Jim Holincheck’s suggestion, and for those in the audience to young to remember Jim Holincheck, he’s a former HCM analyst for Gardener, an incredibly smart guy, who now works for WorkDay. He had written me a long email suggesting a new technology platform to run a revived HR tech discussion group. Editing the next Firing Line video, which debuts on November 9th, the Senior Practitioner Owen [Scorning 00:06:59]. Trying to arrange dinner with Marcus Buckingham, who is the single best presenter I’ve ever seen in a conference in my life.
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| In LA, when I’m there for the Cornerstone User Conference in May and then personally helping a CEO friend fund just the right spot for his wedding pictures outside Moab, Utah in Canyon Lands or Arches National Parks, both of which I have visited three times and I know very well. I also had two hour long phone calls, one about promoting Firing Line with my second client, IN [Floor 00:07:39] and another about selling it to a third. The day before, Kent Plunkett, who started Salary.com which you probably remember and actually has not stopped, it’s still online. You probably remember it well. Only to have that company taken away from him, and just two weeks ago, he managed to re-purchase the assets from IBM. He came by the house with his former and current CMO to spend about 5 hours telling me the amazing back story, most of that unfortunately off the record, and his plans to re-launch. That will probably be my next column, especially since the executives who sold it to him from IBM smarter workforce are coming by next week for a similar 5 or 6 hour visit. That’s what my days are like.
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| John Sumser: | Sounds like a great time. You have this extraordinary reputation for being a stickler for quality. What’s that all about?
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| Bill Kutik: | Well, I do. I hope it’s not just being obsessive-compulsive. As a journalist, I learned that God is in the details. If you don’t sweat the details, you have no right to be working. I have zero tolerance in writing, for instance, for sloppiness or shoddiness of any kind. A split infinitive of the wrong use of single quotation marks, makes me nuts. It does extend to everything because early on, the VP of conferences, for HR tech, twice threatened to punch me out during a meeting, because I kept saying to him, “This isn’t good enough. This needs to be better. You need to change this.” To be fair, he had a thousand things on his mind and the last thing he wanted was me nagging at him. I was right, it wasn’t good enough. That’s all because for better or for worse, all the work I do is a physical extension of me. It reflects my knowledge, my taste, my standards, my smarts, and like anybody, I always want to look as good as I can. That’s where that comes from.
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| John Sumser: | That’s interesting, it seems to make a difference and it’s one of the interesting things to try to balance out as the consequence of that hard edge about quality is a reputation that has influence embedded in the reputation. Most people don’t get that. It’s a very interesting thing that you’ve done. Now, you’re … Go ahead.
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| Bill Kutik: | I’m happy to have that reputation. People know I just don’t accept second best, any time. They come into varying relationships with me knowing that in advance. That’s fine. I don’t bite people’s butts the way I used to because unbelievably I’ve gotten a little mellower in my old age. I still, I just won’t take the second rate. Never have, never will.
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| John Sumser: | That show in the new show, the Firing Line with Bill Kutik. It seems to be that what you’re trying to do is breathe some depth into a landscape where the conversation has gotten pretty shallow. Is the show working? Are you finding an audience?
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| Bill Kutik: | Until I wrote down, when you do a You Tube Channel page, you have to write a paragraph describing the show under a tab item that nobody ever clicks on to read. Until I wrote down the show description, I hadn’t realized how consistent I had been for the last 20 years. Namely, that the bedrock of everything I’ve done since HR tech has been the same principal. Namely, guests or presenters talk about what they’re thinking and doing, not what they’re selling or which software they’re using. That total lack of marketing slant or bias, in short the old fashioned journalism I grew up with that will be dead, certainly by the time I am, that old fashioned stuff really resonates with audiences in every channel where I’ve practiced it, the latest one being Firing Line.
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| I’m hoping that Firing Line will be my last great success and it’s shaping up to be, happily. The audience is all ready 2X the radio show, so I’ve gone from 500 to 3,000 people per episode, to 1,000 to 6,000 per episode. That’s without any direct mail so far, which I know from all the years of directing marketing at HR tech and the radio show is really the key to gathering eyeballs and bodies. I want every show to have 10,000 viewers and I know that they can. One little indicator is after a year, we have 700 subscribers, without ever asking anyone to subscribe. An attraction among sponsors has really been terrific.
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| You’ve seen the show. When I decide to do the show, I said, I don’t want it to look like a Skype video interview. I don’t want it to look like a Google Plus Hangout. I have previously had the misfortune of using the Web X video application, which is totally terrible and has not been updated since 2006. I said, “I know the way TV used to work,” because I used to watch the network nightly news. I can’t remember watching it once in the past 8 years, but I used to watch it. You did too, probably. In the old days.
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| John Sumser: | Absolutely.
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| Bill Kutik: | I said, “That’s the way television was meant to look.” Yeah, I realize that these new formats allow for an instancy, a recency, that the old formats, which are so much harder to do, don’t allow, but I said, I’ll take that gamble, because I think that’s important. You’ve seen it. The program looks exactly like Charlie Rose, which we did very deliberately, because of the emotional buttons that presses in people. I think those buttons are accurate for us too, which is voracity and independence and truthfulness. The program, as a result, is not cheap to produce. Old fashioned television shot in a rented real, TV studio with my Emmy Award Winning partner Bob Gillene doing the directing and the editing. None of that is cheap. If every vendor who has asked me for a proposal and expressed solid interest in doing it actually signed and you and I both know that will never happen. If they were to sign, I’d be booked out through mid-2018. I all ready have signed contracts for the first quarter of 2017. I’m feeling like we’re cooking.
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| John Sumser: | That’s fantastic. What a great thing. It’s a cool time to be doing a show like that because the world of software is changing, I think. What are you seeing as you survey the landscape these days that’s different about how software is being developed, sold, implemented?
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| Bill Kutik: | It is, you’re absolutely right, it is a cool time. My friend Jeff Feffer, who is the closest thing to an HR professor at Stanford Business School and writes a great blog for Fortune Magazine, which does not accept payments for blogs, unlike Fortune, where anybody can buy a blog and just advertise themselves for 800 words. Fortune, happily doesn’t do that yet. Jeff, that’s part of the death of the old fashioned journalism I was talking about. Jeff once said to me, “Hey, Silicon -” he’s lived in Palo Alto for 40 years. Actually, he lives in Hillsborough, but Stanford’s in Palo Alto.
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| Silicon Valley is really, only about 20 large companies with hundreds and hundreds of start ups, acting as their R&D labs, hoping to be acquired by them. I think that will continue. The New York Times recently pointed out, actually it was a story yesterday that despite all this talk about disruption and new technologies killing old companies and Uber killing the taxi industry and air B & B killing our cows, it pointed out that there are five Tech companies that rule the world now and are probably going to be ruling the world for some time in the future. Namely, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and a revived and renewed Microsoft. Nobody’s disrupting those guys. They’re all worried about being disrupted, but no one’s disrupted them yet.
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| Similarly in our HCM world, it’s going to be Work Day, SAP, and Oracle, at least for large enterprises for a long time. I had a drink with Dave Duffield, at the last HR Tech and he asked me whom he should be worrying about. Then he quickly dismissed my answer and said, “I’m worried about the next Work Day coming along and I don’t see them coming.” There’s a reason Dave’s been so successful over his 50 year career is that that’s his attitude and Work Day is his fifth start up in HR.
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| That might be Zenefits, but it has a long way to go before it does that. The thing that’s crucial about Zenefits that most people don’t realized because they haven’t sat down for two hours with the CEO, as I did during Dream Force in San Francisco about a year ago. While every body is anxious to optimize their applications for the phone and have them run on the phone, Zenefits runs like your phone. How many times has your phone done something incredibly cool that has saved you a lot of work and bother and you’ve said to yourself, “Damn it, why doesn’t my laptop do that?” Right? “Why doesn’t my laptop make things happen so automatically and seamlessly?” Why, whenever I do something on my laptop, do I have to labor for hours to make the changes and corrections that ripple out from it? That’s what Zenefits has done.
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| They’ve made these HR apps which admittedly right now, service an average client size of 10 employees, let’s keep that in mind. Only ten. They’ve made these apps run like your phone, not just on your phone. Given the movement to mobile and given the fact that you and I run into 25, even 30 year olds where their primary computing device is their phone, not a laptop. I’ve always thought it unfortunate that the name Smart Phone got attached to that device, because what we know is that what it is is simple a pocket computer, or a mobile computer, that happens, very occasionally to be used for phone calls. Particularly by really young people who tend to text, rather than call anybody. That’s what I think’s going to be happening.
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| John Sumser: | That’s interesting. I probably couldn’t disagree with you more but, that’s a fascinating thing. I can’t imagine an application that works better on my phone. Not one.
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| Bill Kutik: | You think all your applications work better on your laptop?
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| John Sumser: | Absolutely. Absolutely.
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| Bill Kutik: | OK. I’m not … I don’t’ disagree with that, John. What I’m talking about is the integration of new applications. Do you find that you can bring a new application into your laptop as easily as you can on your phone?
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| John Sumser: | On my phone, I have these little things that are like sub-routines. [Crosstalk 00:21:35] I can move these sub-routines around, but they’re not integrated. They’re just all in my phone. The integration happens in my head, which is exactly where the integration happens on my laptop.
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| Bill Kutik: | That’s a good point.
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| John Sumser: | No, I don’t buy that the app design that’s associated with cell phones is scalable for enterprise purposes. That’s nonsense.
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| Bill Kutik: | Ah. I agree with that completely, which is why I emphasize Zenefits’ client size. At the recent Work Day Summit, the guys, the executives presenting, because they’re Silicon Valley guys, instead of talking about apps. I literally interrupted them and I said, “Pardon me, apps are for finding a cheap hotel room for the night, and for hailing a ride across town. You guys are writing applications that run companies with 200,000 or 400,000 employees and I don’t think you should be using the terms apps.”
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| John Sumser: | That’s a great point. That is really, a great point because it’s the language that’s getting in the way here. The Work Day model that you point to, which is build a platform that’s a library of tools that can be assembled into applications sitting on top of it is the way the software’s going to move forward. We’ll have that function which is that you need to have a platform of capability in order to generate a set of apps and that that is a defining characteristic of an eco-system, that’s how software’s changing. You couldn’t be righter than to notice that’s what’s changing. Confusing the metaphor so that it sounds like it’s something that has to do with mobile distracts from the powerful thing that’s actually happening in software development and isn’t about making it so that the piece of software is so stupid you could use it on your phone.
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| Bill Kutik: | OK. Let’s move on. I got out from out under. Let’s [inaudible 00:24:00].
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| John Sumser: | Branding and experience seem to be, at least in some corners, people are saying these things trump functionality in a piece of software. Do you think that’s true? Do you think the way people are buying is going to change as software becomes a commodity, functionality becomes and commodity?
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| Bill Kutik: | That’s exactly what I was thinking about that question. That while there are still breakthroughs and vendors come up with new ways of doing things. Functionality generally is in fact becoming a commodity, because most vendors can do more or less the same thing. There are still differences. They can all do the fundamentals. In the old days, again, we’re talking enterprise applications here. In the old days, vendor selections were made on these rigid comparisons of functions and features and these 140 page RFPs, with 700 check boxes of whether your software could do all these things. If you didn’t check every right box, you didn’t make it to the next step of the selection. I don’t think that’s happening as much anymore. I think there’s an assumption, at least among established and major vendors, that they could do all this stuff.
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| The question then becomes what do you distinguish yourself with? What are your competitive discriminators anymore if everyone can do the same thing? I think that the ecosystem that you mentioned is becoming more and more important. I think that that support and customer service is becoming more and more important because as Mike Etling, the President at SAP said on my first Firing Line, [ASASS 00:26:03] vendors like and outsourcer. In the old days, when it was on print, something went wrong, the software guy could blame the implementation guy, who could blame the network provider who could blame whomever. The Sass vendor’s responsible for all of it. It’s one throat to choke.
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| The service that the customers get from their SASS vendors I think is going to become a real competitive discriminator.
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| John Sumser: | I’m going to try to squeeze this next one in. What do you think is driving the evolution of HR technology these days?
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| Bill Kutik: | I can give you a really short answer to that. That happily for all of us, is the larger developments and software technology at large. Like machine learning, right now. On that same magazine years ago, Grand Old Man at the time of HR tech Al Walker, founder of Iram, when it was called HRSP or whatever it was called. Came to my office, another advisor. He said, “Bill, you’re going to get bored with this stuff really soon, you should go do something else.” He was totally wrong. I have never been bored with this stuff in 26 years because HR vendors have in fact, been incredibly nimble at adopting all the new technologies that come down the pike.
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| The dirty secret that we all know is that while some of what HR does may be really boring, the technology that enables a lot of it, rarely is.
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| John Sumser: | Wow. That’s great. We’ve exhausted our time together. What should I have asked you in this conversation?
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| Bill Kutik: | Well, you should have asked me if I still aspire to sound like Dean Martin, which you accused me of doing 15 years ago.
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| John Sumser: | I don’t know that you sound like Dean Martin, but you certainly are the most gracious host in the industry as Dean Martin was.
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| Bill Kutik: | Well, thank you.
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| John Sumser: | Let’s give the audience some take aways here. What are a couple of things you want to remember besides Google, Firing Line with Bill Kutik and watch a couple of episodes, you’re going to be amazed at what’s there. Besides that.
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| Bill Kutik: | Well, I actually want them to take away something we didn’t talk about, which is that every HR practitioner has to get tech savvy. Generalists, recruiters, whatever. They don’t have to become programmers, they don’t have to become systems implementation people, they just need to understand this stuff well enough to get the benefits of their work to distinguish one product from another. If they don’t do that, they need to start looking for a large cardboard box to live in under the freeway. They’re not going to have jobs.
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| John Sumser: | Wow. Well, maybe we should come back and do the primer so that people have a starting place with all that. It’s not very easy to do.
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| Bill Kutik: | No, it’s not.
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| John Sumser: | Thanks for the time. Why don’t you take a moment and reintroduce yourself and tell people how to get a hold of you.
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| Bill Kutik: | People can follow me on Twitter @billkutik, K-U-T-I-K, of course. They can email me at Bill@Kutik.com. I registered the domain a long time ago, but my sister refused to pay me rent to use it. Links to everything I do are on my You Tube Channel, and they can find it easily once they’re on YouTube by searching for the full name of the show, Firing Line with Bill Kutik and clicking on the first return of the search that has just my picture on it. They can read what I write, and listen to my radio shows and watch the TV stuff.
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| John Sumser: | That’s great. Again, thanks for doing this, Bill. It’s been great to have you here. You’ve been listening to HR Examiner Radio. We’ve been talking with Bill Kutik who is the host of Firing Line with Bill Kutik. If you don’t know of Bill and his work, Google him. It’ll make your day. With that, thanks.
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| Bill Kutik: | Thank you for your time, John. Pleasure being a guest for the second time.
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| John Sumser: | Thanks. You’re very welcome and we wish you a good day. The sun is coming over the hill here in California and have a great weekend.
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| Bill Kutik: | Well, yeah, I’ll be shoveling snow.
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End transcript
