The Future Is Now: Bill Burns Of Zebra Technologies On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Be a good listener — always being open to different and diverse perspectives, this is a key to driving new ideas through innovation.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bill Burns.
Bill Burns joined Zebra Technologies in 2015. In his current role as Chief Product & Solutions Officer, Bill oversees product and solutions strategy, investments and development for Zebra’s expansive technology portfolio which includes Mobile Computing, Specialty Printers, Data Capture Solutions, Location Solutions, Intelligent Edge Solutions and Software Solutions. Bill is also responsible for the Chief Technology Office and has more than 25 years’ experience in the high-tech sector.
Prior to joining Zebra, Mr. Burns served as Chief Executive Officer of Embrane, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital backed startup, which was acquired by Cisco in April 2015. Prior to joining Embrane, he served as Chief Executive Officer of Spirent Communications, a global leader in test and measurement solutions publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. He has also held various executive and sales leadership roles at Tellabs, Inc., now Coriant.
For over five years he was actively involved with the Silicon Valley American Heart Association and American Stroke Association chairing the association Heart Walk and as a member of the executive leadership team for the Silicon Valley Heart Ball.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I started my career in a customer service organization, supporting customers post-sale through answering technical questions about the company’s products. I realized at that time that I enjoyed the direct interaction with customers. As I was based in a regional sales office of the company, a logical career path was to support our sales account managers and our potential customers directly in a pre-sales engineering capacity through their buying process.
My career then progressed as I moved from being a pre-sales engineer, an account manager and then serving in various sales management roles. Along the way, I learned the customer always comes first. If you put the customer first, you gain the respect and trust of your customers in good times as well as in challenging times.
Focusing on the customer and always putting them first allowed me to excel in my North America-based sales career, but I wanted to continue to grow as a leader. So, I moved into a role leading the company’s EMEA sales, marketing and services teams which provided me an opportunity to apply my customer first approach outside North America.
Continuing to build my leadership experience, I became the general manager of a business unit, applying my customer first approach and my learnings from my previous roles. This ultimately led to the opportunity for me to lead a product division and then serve as a public company CEO.
Today as Chief Product & Solutions Officer at Zebra Technologies, I lead all of Zebra’s business units, bringing innovative new products, software and solutions to market with a keen focus on applying this customer first approach to innovation.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Earlier in my career, I traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to meet with our regional sales team and customers at our Middle East Sales office. Upon arrival, I was met on the jet bridge by Lebanese immigration officials who approached me and asked if I was William Burns. When I confirmed that was my name, they responded by saying, “Ambassador, come with me!”
When I tried to explain there must have been a mix-up, they continued to ask me if my name was William Burns and more specifically, William Joseph Burns (which in fact, is my full name), and address me as ambassador. They then proceeded to escort me through the immigration process in very short order, and I very quickly exited the airport and was on my way — all the while continuing to wonder why they were addressing me as ambassador and providing me expedited immigration processing.
It wasn’t until the next day I realized another more famous individual who, at the time, was the Assistant Secretary of State under U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had the exact same name as mine, William Joseph Burns, and they mistakenly believed I was him! Today the ‘other’ William Joseph Burns is serving as the Director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
The convergence of cloud, mobility and IoT has enabled Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in applications such as industrial automation, robotics and machine vision. To be successful, business leaders need information about their workforce, inventory, and suppliers in real time. Zebra helps businesses digitize and automate their operations to allow workers to be more effective, productive, and engaged in their roles.
For example, front-line workers within healthcare systems are under increasing pressure. Zebra helps our customers enhance their operations, including increased visibility into medical equipment and medication inventory along with digitizing patient information, ultimately contributing to the improved quality of patient care.
Zebra’s solutions also increase efficiency for retailers from the warehouse to the front of the store. This allows businesses to create different types of work environments that enable people to take on roles that are more interesting, fulfilling and career elevating, while alleviating resource challenges like hiring enough workers and retaining talent.
How do you think this might change the world?
Zebra’s innovative solutions enable front-line workers to be more efficient and productive with the information needed to perform the next best action. Workers can be focused on more meaningful tasks and ultimately, they help create a better, more frictionless experience for end-users. With our solutions, supply chains are more dynamic, customers and patients are better served, and workers are more engaged as our products and solutions help them sense, analyze and act in real time. Autonomous robots, for example, move products more quickly and without human injury. Smart cameras and scanners eliminate human errors and increase performance on production lines, and software solutions equip front-line workers with data and insights that can best connect them with inventory and customers.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
I don’t see any drawbacks, but rather new opportunities related to technology. We are only skimming the surface with what we are doing today as we expand into new use cases with our customers, and there are even more to be realized. It’s hard to make predictions about the future, but one thing we can be sure of is that the jobs of tomorrow, including mine, will be different from those of today. Digital transformation is accelerating in every industry with disruptors changing the way we manufacture, deliver goods and even work remotely.
Today, we leverage Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning as part of our solutions and focus on how they help people better achieve their everyday tasks and goals at work. With these technologies, we can increase efficiencies, improve workflows, and provide deeper data analysis which ultimately enables better decision making. Overall, these benefits enable front-line workers to complete their tasks more efficiently and focus on the activities that are the most important, leaving repetitive tasks to be handled through automation.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
Zebra provides products, software and solutions to customers of all sizes — including 94% of the Fortune 100. They are developed in collaboration with customers who share our vision of Enterprise Asset Intelligence. This vision is about making every front-line worker and asset at the edge visible, connected and fully optimized. Our innovators see how advanced technology can be applied to solve a problem beyond the way it’s being applied today. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption and deployment of this technology to support the growth of e-commerce, omnichannel, and the need for more sophisticated and efficient workflows to increase operational efficiency and productivity.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
Zebra’s solutions incorporate mobile computing, barcode scanning, RFID, thermal printing, plus location, temperature and motion sensing technologies to elevate the shopping experience, track and manage inventory as well as improve supply chain efficiency and patient care. Increasingly, Zebra helps our customers leverage the power of automation to unlock new levels of performance within their businesses. We see widespread adoption of innovative solutions for automated data capture (using machine vision capabilities and IoT sensors), decision automation (using prescriptive analytics and AI-powered task/workforce management software), and physical automation (using robotics-based solutions), all working in concert with one another to augment the front-line worker and empower them to do their best work. To expand the adoption of these solutions even further, Zebra’s products are increasingly being enriched with software in devices and in the cloud to provide our customers and partners the tools they need to put their data to work, allowing for higher levels of security and manageability as well as new analytics that can elevate the performance of their businesses.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
We leverage traditional and online marketing outreach mechanisms. We also get tremendous visibility due to our leadership position in the technology market segments in which we invest. Along with our ~10,000 channel partners globally, we communicate almost daily with our global customers that represent 82% of retailers, 67% of transportation and logistics companies, and 81% of manufacturers, and we listen to what their needs are and work with them to provide innovative solutions. As part of our marketing strategy, we are updating our digital platforms to ensure these platforms are capable of guiding the customer journey. Modern digital marketing technology offers many ways to create an “audience of one” when delivering marketing messages. Personalization capabilities maximize the opportunity to deliver the most relevant messages to target audiences while web personalization tools identify visitors and enable us to create a more seamless online experience.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Our CEO, Anders Gustafsson and I have worked together for more than twenty years. I am grateful for having the opportunity to work with Anders at three different public companies, and I am proud of what we have accomplished together through innovation and a customer first approach.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I credit Zebra’s success to our people. It is their ongoing contributions that enable Zebra to help our customers and partners be successful as well. We are very fortunate to have extremely talented and diverse employees around the globe who drive our successful culture, innovation and growth through our customer first approach. They also help make Zebra a company which focuses on “doing well by doing good” as many of our employees give back to their local communities. Zebra offers four days of volunteer paid time off for our nearly 10,000 employees globally to engage with charitable organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, FIRST Robotics, American and International Red Cross and many others. I was actively involved with the American Heart and Stroke Association, and I am a Founding Board Member of the new Business Innovation Leaders Forum, a global community of independent business leaders who actively explore innovative business transformation technologies and solutions to propel enterprises forward.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why.
- Business is about people — relationship building and networking are critically important across almost everything we do in business.
- Be a good listener — always being open to different and diverse perspectives, this is a key to driving new ideas through innovation.
- Treat people with fairness as this is the way you want to be treated.
- You must own your own career and must be patient along the way — no one is going to do it for you, but you need to be patient as sometimes what we see as our next career opportunities do not always work out, but something else even more exciting will develop over time if you are patient.
- Profitable growth of a business is critical — it is what creates the biggest opportunities and is most rewarding for the company, its employees and its shareholders. There is no substitute for profitable growth.
All the above have played an important role in my development as a leader, and they are things that I try to apply every day. When I speak to individuals early in their careers, such as summer interns at Zebra, I talk about these things to pass along some of the learning I have had in my career. Within the next few hours after those meetings, I typically receive LinkedIn requests from many of the interns in the audience, which I take as a proof point that they at least took away from my talk that relationships matter. I hope they also took note of the other four as they are equally important!
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 😊
I encourage people to give back by getting involved in their communities. While we all lead busy lives, we can all make a big difference in the lives of those around us by taking some time to give back, especially to those who are less fortunate than ourselves. I recently had the opportunity to volunteer, along with other members of Zebra Nation at the Safe Zone Activity Day which is organized each year by NFL executive, Troy Vincent, his wife Tommi and their family. Seeing the joy and excitement on the students’ faces at Muir Academy in Long Beach, CA was incredibly rewarding. This memorable day was filled with sports activities, the donation of school supplies, and inspiring interaction with the elementary school students. The Vincent family’s commitment to “intentional service” through its Love Thy Neighbor CDC philanthropic organization is making a difference in the lives of thousands of people each year. We can all make a difference through our connections with people, talents and resources to positively impact the lives of others.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite life lesson quote is, “Men and Women for Others.” I was first exposed to this quote when my oldest son went to a Jesuit high school. The ultimate meaning behind the words is simple: do something for someone who is less fortunate than yourself. If we expand upon that simple concept, it leads us to live our lives and always look for opportunities to give back to those in our local communities or those far away that are in need.
Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 😊
Zebra Ventures is the strategic investment arm of Zebra Technologies. With the discipline of a financial investor and the value of a strategic partner, we invest in early-stage companies that extend Zebra’s ability to empower enterprise customers with a performance edge. Working closely with our portfolio companies, we provide venture capital to nurture businesses through the startup, early growth and expansion phases. We also bring deep domain expertise, unique access to our business units and go-to-market resources to help portfolio companies meet and exceed their growth plans. We continue to review qualified investment opportunities to extend the growth of innovative new companies alongside our organic innovation.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
I enjoy connecting with others on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wjburns/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
The Future Is Now: Bill Burns Of Zebra Technologies On How Their Technological Innovation Will… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
