Collaboration Cafe - Iced Americano With Brad Hintze

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Craig Durr: Jules, is it gonna be your birthday soon?

Jules: Yeah, tomorrow.

Craig Durr: Is it really? Jules, this is my friend Brad.

Brad Hintze: Hi, Jules. Nice to meet you.

Jules: You too.

Craig Durr: I wanna get a latte.

Brad Hintze: Can I get an Americano?

Craig Durr: So, one Americano, one latte. Everybody. This is Craig Durr, chief analyst and founder of the Collab Collective. And I wanna welcome you to a new webcast series I'm doing. It's called the Collaboration Cafe. Now, what if you could take some of these industry influencers and executives and sit them down over a cup of coffee, you know, just talk to them and get to know them. Talk about what's taking place in the future of work, remote work. What are they thinking about, things like sustainability, where they think the industry is going, and if you could do it in a relaxed, casual way, so you get to know them as people. That's what the Collaboration Cafe is all about, and that's what I'm excited to bring to you today. So join me for the first episode of the Collaboration Cafe. Oh, and by the way, we're going to be talking to a good friend of mine, Brad Hintze from Crestron. Brad is the Executive Vice President of Marketing, and I think he's going to have a lot of great things to share with us about sustainability, remote work, who knows what else, all over a cup of coffee. Come join me.

Everyone, I want to introduce you to Brad Hintze. Brad, how you doing?

Brad Hintze: I'm great. Craig, so good to see you.

Craig Durr: Good to see you. Hey. Thanks for joining me on this first edition of the Collaboration Cafe.

Brad Hintze: It's a beautiful day.

Craig Durr: It is. We should talk about that. We're actually meeting in Park City, Utah. Now, you actually are a Utah resident.

Brad Hintze: I am. I was born and raised in Utah and lived south of Salt Lake City, and such a great place, with all the mountains and the skiing and the snow and all the great things to do here.

Craig Durr: I'm part of the problem and the challenge of people here in Utah. So I'm living here remotely. I am actually living one of those experiences that's been driven by our new workforce right now, just having spent the summer out here and trying to continue to do the commute and everything else. Now you also, though you work remote from your corporate headquarters, from Crestron. They're located back in New Jersey right now. And so how long have you been doing this, working remote for them?

Brad Hintze: So I've been there about almost four years, doing the remote and the commuting. And I commute about there, out there about once a month, maybe twice a month. Just depends on what we have going on. And then the rest of the time I work from here or out visiting partners and customers. And you know, it's a great setup to have the flexibility to be able to live that way. I always love going into the office, though it's super energizing, but it is good to be able to be productive when I'm here too.

Craig Durr: That's good. Well, I'm glad you can. I buy you a cup of coffee. Let's do it. Let's start walking this way. Hey, now, but you actually have a large team now. They're managed virtually all around the world, right?

Brad Hintze: Yeah. And so we have a distributed team. It's not like they're all centered just in New Jersey, and so that flexibility is great for me and for the rest of the team as well.

Craig Durr: So tell me, what is your remote work policy right now for your team? How's that look?

Brad Hintze: So we actually have a really good hybrid and Remote Setup. So we have a number that are just strictly remote, and then we have a number that are hybrid, two days in the office. And then they can choose whether they want Monday, Wednesday or Tuesday, Thursday.

Craig Durr: Okay, okay. So you give them the flexibility to choose how that's taking place there.

Brad Hintze: Yep. And each of the individual teams will tend to make that decision together, just for their own team dynamics. And they make the best decision, you know, balancing the needs of the employee and the needs of the team as well.

Craig Durr: Got it. So, but with a team distributed, and you got this two day a week policy with flexibility, there's got to be some challenges to it, right? So tell me, what are some of the challenges you think you're seeing right now?

Brad Hintze: I think that the biggest challenge, the thing that I spend the most time thinking about, is, how do we keep the team connected and feeling like they're totally engaged? I'm not worried about productivity, really. It is, how do they feel like they're getting that team commitment, or the team culture, that vibe that you get when you're in the office? I think that it's really easy for a remote worker or a hybrid worker to feel like they're on an island, right? And we don't want that, because it helps increase the loyalty, right? Helps that help for one another on a team, you really need to foster that.

Craig Durr: It's really interesting. I actually just wrote an article about Dell, and Dell had a policy where they were trying to encourage people to come back into the office by tying it to promotions. If you came back into the office, that was one of the requirements to be for promotions. And interestingly enough, Dell only had about 50% of their people sign up for that. Now 50% did, which was good, but it was interesting to say, what is motivating those people? And I think it comes back to what you're talking about. Did they feel a sense of connection to that culture? What was going on there?

Brad Hintze: Exactly. And I think that, like for me personally, when I go to New Jersey, and I spend a few days in the office, the thing that is so invigorating for me is that face to face connection. And, and so it is, you know, if you don't get that injection periodically, how do you keep that within the team? I think that's a priority.

Craig Durr: We could throw technology against it. Do you have any cool technology ideas that you're liking right now? One of those really interesting things I think people are coming to realize right now is self regulation when they're working hybrid. You talked about your team is still being productive. You know, the hardest time I have is when to stop. I don't know about you. Is there a trick that you have just to figure out it's time?

Brad Hintze: I'm never good at it either. Usually by dinner time, though, I naturally will just come to an end. I have the benefit of working for a primarily East Coast based company, so everyone's gone. That helps. By three o'clock my time, everything's starting to wind down, and then I can focus on my stuff. And so then that's a good, natural thing. And so I start very early and then finish up early evening. It's that that helps, but it's certainly a consideration.

Craig Durr: You take advantage of being out here in the West. I would love to do that. I mean, so let me tell you, for example, let me show you what my day looks like. You tell me how yours might look. I'm waking up early. Same thing here. We're in the Mountain Time Zone, right? I've got to clean up some emails. Usually it's a great time to do some productivity work like focus time. For you, it's probably doing some other you know, whatever you do as an executive type stuff.

Brad Hintze: Nothing, nothing at all.

Craig Durr: But at that point in time, then it's I'm finding for myself, doing blocks in the days is what, and kind of sticking to those blocks, because otherwise I get too easily distracted. Any tactics like that, you're using yourself?

Brad Hintze: So for me, a lot of my day gets sucked up with conversations with people, I'm sure, and so I have to block out time to work on stuff. And if I'm not proactive at putting into my calendar, it's like, go work on this project and then go work on this project. I just end up spending all day on calls. And that's important. I mean, that's a really important part of my job, but I need some of that thinking and work time on some of those things too. So I do. I typically get up pretty early and I'll go for a walk. And that's actually when I have a colleague in the UK. And so I'll call him, it's 5:30 my time, perfect. You know, it's late morning for him, and it's a good time just to connect on a couple things. We riff on stuff. And so that's a really good connection. And then I'll go in and pound through a couple of emails, jump into meetings, and then afternoon is when I tend to do my focus.

Craig Durr: Yeah, my creative is in the morning. Sounds like your creative in the afternoon?

Craig Durr: This is some recent news. I would love to ask you about one of the companies that both you and I work with, Zoom actually came under criticism from a statement made by their chief people officer, the person in charge of their HR. He was talking about how Zoom was transitioning to their own work policy. Now, the media always spins it. They always say it's a mandate, but they're trying to get people back into the office at least two days a week. Very similar to what you guys have going on as well. But in the same interview, he spoke and said, but I'm fully remote, and that policy doesn't apply to me. Did you hear about this interview?

Brad Hintze: I did. I did hear about this interview, and I feel so bad.

Craig Durr: I feel like he might have been caught or misquoted. But how do you think about this dichotomy of some people working fully remote, some being hybrid and being mandated to come in just based upon the fact that they're close to an office?

Brad Hintze: I mean, I think it's a challenge. We have wrestled with this internally as well. We have certain teams that work really well hybrid. They want to be hybrid. And, you know, in a mix of remote and hybrid employees, but then we have some other teams that want to be everyone in the office. And so the challenge has been, how do you do that equitably, so that this department has this policy and this department has that policy, and I think that organizations will continue to feel it out and figure it out. I think for him, you know, I don't understand, I don't know all the dynamics behind closed doors, and perhaps he was simply misquoted. But I don't think any organization can have a strict "This is the policy for the whole organization" approach. And I think you need that flexibility on a per department basis, based on the function, based on the needs of in-office or hybrid. You should have that flexibility built in so you can accommodate that.

Craig Durr: I agree. This is what I saw, that he did that I thought was really interesting. So they stated some policies, and if you drill into the policies, because interestingly, the mandate was applying to people who lived within 50 miles of the office. One of their offices is San Jose. If you're within 50 miles of San Jose, that could still be a three-hour commute. And you're talking about that. Was it nuanced enough to be to the individual, to the location? I mean, ultimately, what I think they're trying to do is this, their job is to drive, not just work in the office, but when do you work in person? And when you start defining when you're going to work in person and what those key ideas are. That's great. As a company, you have offices, and that's a key asset. You can outfit them really well. You can make them very comfortable, inviting. You can make it a team community space, so you can leave things there and come back to the work and what have you. Those are the right things. I think they can place, but they got lost in some of the rules and regulations, like you said, how they wrote it out in black and white.

Brad Hintze: Well, I think that organizations also have to pressure test ideas. And there are plenty of times where you'll hear from an employee, "Well, I want to be fully remote," or "I want to come in two or three days a week." Great. Let's do that as a policy. Let's see the reaction. Let's see what happens, and then we can adjust from there. And then there is also the concept of, "Well, I want a nice office space when I come in." Okay, great. How much should we invest? How much should we really make sure that we have built out? You don't really know until you kind of force that issue. And so sometimes you have to do some of these challenging decisions in order to make sure that you have a clear path forward.

Craig Durr: Real estate is one of the largest investments that companies make that has the long-term commitment and it does play into and it's unfortunate, it has to play side by side with a very fungible idea, very important idea, like human capital and how that plays into space. Long-term decision, immediate, you know, tangible, one that changes from week to week based upon what's taking place in life. It's tough. It is. You know what the trick would be? Good coffee?

Brad Hintze: Good coffee is always the right trick.

Craig Durr: Let's do it. Jules, thank you so much, and Happy birthday to you.

Jules: Thank you.

Craig Durr: Oh, hope you have a good one. You said she won eight medals in the Special Olympics?

Brad Hintze: You did? Oh, my medals in skiing. Oh, wow. Congratulations. That is incredible. You clearly take advantage of being in Park City with all the skiing.

Craig Durr: You don't medal in Zumba, do you?

Jules: No.

Brad Hintze: Let's go see if we can find those chairs out there.

Craig Durr: Okay, let's do that to the higher ground. So what do you think of my office view here?

Brad Hintze: I love the mountains. Isn't this great? It's a beautiful place.

Craig Durr: It feels really spoiled. But this is a great segue to another thing I wanted to ask you. You and I have actually been doing a lot of work talking lately about sustainability in our industry, and I've been thinking about this, do you feel like there's an authenticity to how people are approaching sustainability, or is it a bit of like "me too" right now going on?

Brad Hintze: Yeah, I think that certainly there are those that are legitimately committed to sustainability. And then there are those that are just doing it to put a thin veneer over what they're doing, you know, whether it's to appease their shareholders or to attract a certain kind of customer. And then I think that there are those that are also just trying to figure it out.

Craig Durr: I know, right? I think it's a lot of it too. You know, if you could take a negative angle on it and call it green washing, I've heard that term. But I've heard someone refer to it as the green wave. And the way they kind of alluded to it was, look, we are trying to figure this out and get it right in the Americas. We're actually behind the European markets. I mean, they're much more mature. They have regulations around that they have certain measurements that they want to put in place. I think the best thing we've got going for us is we've got a case study that we can mimic and probably follow those as well. So working for an international company, I mean, I think you guys are already a leg up on that as well, too, right?

Brad Hintze: We see a lot of pressure from European regions and clearly Asia, too, is starting to pick up. A lot of customers are asking a lot of questions about it. It's a demand, it's a requirement. These are beyond the governmental regulations, there are many customers now that that's just an expectation from all of their suppliers. And we have several that are actually actively engaged in saying, "I want this solution, I want it to show up like this, to attain my own sustainability goals." And so I think that it's a good thing to see this partnership that's happening. I think that's where it becomes really genuine and real, right? And it feels like there's a real commitment there to sustainability, not just that "Let's check a box" approach.

Craig Durr: You know, here's a great, interesting idea off of that. I love the idea of what you talked about, a partnership between the customers and the vendors. What do you feel about partnerships between vendors around sustainability? So, for example, there's a company out there that is advertising that they're offering to share any sustainability best practices that they learn with other peers. Do you think that's something that's sustainable in a sustainability story?

Brad Hintze: I think so, because I think that as we have gone deeper along these initiatives, there is a steep learning curve, and so many people are really looking for new and interesting and innovative ways, and I think there needs to be better knowledge sharing, and I think that's really important. I think for us too, as a vendor, we work with our channel partners, and channel partners play a big role in fulfilling some of those sustainability initiatives. And so we actually have partnered with another organization, and they are really great about educating customers, educating channel partners, and so hopefully together, we can all be focused on these things. We have to manufacture products in a really sustainable way, but we all have to adopt the right kinds of business practices to implement it.

Craig Durr: As vendors, we are here, I'm here, we're all here, ultimately, to manage businesses. We want to do good with the businesses. But you had this challenge of profitability, and then we're talking about sustainability. I know that you have crafted a really great value proposition, that your products have a longevity, they have a shelf life that actually contributes, because in that reuse, replace, renew story, they are keep using, reuse, right? How's it play?

Brad Hintze: So first of all, I didn't craft it, and I think that's an important distinction. That has always been a central tenet of the company, from the founder, George Feldstein. He was deeply committed to delivering products that were high quality, high performance, and they lasted a long time. And making sure that you're building products that way has always been a part of our business, and now we see that it has tremendous benefit in these kinds of things. And so for that, it's easy for us to remain committed to that. And so we make R&D investments all the time around what technology platforms do we commit to? How do we innovate on that? How do we prioritize continually adding value to existing platforms? Now a lot of businesses, they plan their revenue cycles around generational upgrades. That's true, and it is tempting to want to just rapidly go through these new generations to drive new revenue. But it's not, you know, that's one way to do it, and it works well for some, but that's not who we are.

Craig Durr: It's funny because it ties back to the first conversation we were having about remote work. There's an authenticity, I think that comes through with sustainability. And I think that is what's going to help people buy into and support a story, if they see a company doing something in a very authentic way and learning along the way. I think it's going to play well, just like people are learning how to do work, and it's authentic actions that help drive that experience, right?

Brad Hintze: Yeah, absolutely.

Craig Durr: I mean, if you can only package that up and put it on the wall somehow.

Brad Hintze: But you can't, right? You absolutely have to understand what's going on.

Craig Durr: You know, there's one other interesting sustainability challenge in our industry. I'm concerned that we may not have enough young talent coming into our industry. You weren't expecting this question. This is kind of a curveball.

Brad Hintze: I wasn't, but actually I was. We had a lot of conversations about this yesterday. So I totally agree. I think that, you know, one of the challenges we have, and I think one of the opportunities that exist for our trade associations and for other vendors, and even for channel partners too, is this industry, there is a tremendous amount of opportunity, and we're now at a maturity level, from a technology perspective, in an industry go-to-market perspective that you can simply attract smart, business-minded people. They can come in and build a really great business, but we're not reaching them, and we're not inspiring them. I think in the early days of the technology, the technology alone was pulling people in. Now we're more mature. I think that you can take the mature technologies, plus the big business opportunities, and get some new talent in. And it's interesting to figure that out.

Craig Durr: I think we do. I almost wonder if there's a way to start making this part of the skill set, or the idea start in school. I mean, there's a lot of focus on some very nouveau things, like AI engineering and some of these very important things, but we have an industry that has so much consistent business and revenue and employment, but we don't have people there to partake of it. Feels like more people fall into the business, than they do otherwise, right?

Brad Hintze: Well, I did. I fell into it and so many people that I'm surrounded by, they fell into it and they fell in love with the industry, and so they're still there. But I think that one of the other benefits of being in an industry that's beginning to mature from a technology perspective, is you can start using modern technology approaches, modern programming languages, all of that. Then you can start attracting some of that talent. So for instance, you know, in the early days of our control systems, we had a more proprietary kind of approach to programming, and now, though, we have tools that you can use C sharp, you can use HTML5. And these are modern technology, modern development languages and technology approaches. And so then you can pull people right from school and they're productive right away.

Craig Durr: That's great. So let's put the crystal ball in place right now. Okay, we're looking forward right now. What do you see taking place in the world of collaboration? What's coming down the road here? I mean, we've got AI. We're talking about AI, but how are people going to change that, how they might work here in the future. What do you think?

Brad Hintze: I think that as so frequently happens, there's going to be a pendulum shift, and we were forced into a pendulum shift of all remote now we're kind of pulling back, and I think that we'll continue to see a swing into a focus around in-person collaboration, but there will be more deliberateness around that. And so I think that where today, when somebody says the word collaboration, I think a lot of us default to this notion of a virtual attendee and a virtual meeting, I think that that will be centered again around virtual but also in person. And there will be an emphasis on that, I think is really important.

Craig Durr: I can't agree with you more. One of my taglines right now, it's not "return to the office," it's "return to in person." And the challenge for us is to figure out when and where that in-person is best, absolutely, for both the individuals and the business. And that goes back to that idea the business has offices. That's a key asset. It's not going to solve everything, but they can invest in that for those in-person moments that work?

Brad Hintze: Well, yeah, because I think those in-person moments become some of those most critical for the business. And whether it is about a meeting or a decision point, or it is just that culture defining, refining kinds of things. So I think that that in-person shift, that in-person emphasis, will be a big deal. Clearly, AI is going to be a big deal. And I think that we're still all figuring it out. I mean, we were talking about it and laughing that, you know, we're still so early. I mean, if you were to draw a correlation between the internet, we're in the CompuServe era. We're not even there yet. We aspire to be at the AOL era, let alone the era that we're in today on the internet.

Craig Durr: It's definitely in the back of my mind. I hear that modem right now.

Brad Hintze: Yeah, we won't be too long before we look at what's happening with ChatGPT and think, "Oh, that's so archaic." It's like Alta Vista, you know?

Craig Durr: I know. You're blowing my mind with all these flashbacks now.

Brad Hintze: I'm dating myself, but, but that's, that's where we're at. And I think that, you know, another thing that we've been talking about internally a lot is, while certainly AI will help benefit some of the features of solutions, right? And you see that with what we're doing in intelligent video, for instance, Speaker tracking and speaker framing, and, you know, face direction and that kind of enhancing that solution experience. But I think for us and our industry too, as the AI era progresses, organizations. Applications will build their own LLMs that are unique to them, that are secure, their own AI approaches and their own, if you want to call it an AI stack. And so how can our industry contribute to the intelligence in that AI stack? Right? I think that's one of the really great and exciting opportunities ahead it is. We don't know what it looks like. In the same way that CompuServe era didn't really know what today would look like from an internet perspective, but people knew there was promise, and through a continual iteration, that's where you get there.

Craig Durr: I mean your products, our industry, the tools we use, touch, so much data, in terms of audio, video content, let alone other things we can contribute in terms of presence, when people are in in an office, physically when they are online, as well, too. All that is just the huge exploration of that idea that data lake, right, all the stuff we contribute.

Brad Hintze: Well, I think that even more importantly, you can associate all that data with the rest of the data from the organization itself, right? And so actually, on my drive up, I was talking to a colleague, and we were bouncing off some of these really great use cases. For instance, today, you know, if you're an AV manager at an educational institution, and you're weighing, should I make these technology investments? What's the refresh cycle look like? What kinds of devices should we put into the room? And you might implement some analytics that will tell you this device is used so frequently. But the disconnect is through those analytics, which is better visibility than you ever had before. You're still not connecting to the actual value that that drives to the organization. For an education institution, it's all about academic performance. Does this device contribute to better academic performance in an AI world and where you have a connection between the data from the AV systems and the data of the rest of the organization. Interesting concept, right? And an AV manager can take and run reports and query and say, All right, I've got classrooms that have document cameras, and they get used frequently. What's the academic performance of the students that are in those classrooms compared to those that don't have that? Do they over perform? Do they underperform? Is there no difference? And unless you live in this kind of AI world, you couldn't really ask that question. You couldn't get that data.

Craig Durr: You can't even fathom putting that question together.

Brad Hintze: You wouldn't, because it was so much work, all that data lives in a million different Excel spreadsheets, if even there.

Craig Durr: Right. I love that idea.

Brad Hintze: And so I think that's the opportunity as we build out into this. And so how do you build that AI infrastructure?

Craig Durr: I love that AI, tying back to those core missions as core objectives of those businesses are right, not just productivity or utilization, but something else to a higher level, right? I love that idea. Well, you know what? I think my coffee is done. I think it's time to wrap it up. This is everything I wanted, this first edition of the collaboration cafe to be good. I got to understand what you're thinking about. Got to know you better. And we talked about some really interesting things of the future of our industry, right now, right?

Brad Hintze: Yep, absolutely. It was a good couple.

Craig Durr: It was a good couple.

Brad Hintze: I loved it. Yeah, it was definitely worth the drive.

Craig Durr: It was. Brad, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you coming.

Brad Hintze: Thank you, Craig. Good to see you.