A conversation with the 2018 EDUCAUSE Leadership Award winner.
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GB: Let me just start by asking you, how did you get started as a higher education IT professional?
RK: Yeah, that's a great question. I would be surprised if anyone who's honest with you were to tell you that they, from the time they were in elementary school, had this vision of becoming a higher ed CIO, and by the time they were in high school they had a plan. So, I like to say that my career has been an adventure, and really, more than having a plan, I followed the breadcrumbs. In college, I actually thought I was going to be a veterinarian, so I did not follow any IT orthodoxy through computer science. I have a degree in biology, and one in Russian area studies. I went to graduate school in history, and that took me to a natural progression to a short time as an archivist. And, when you're an archivist you study work flows, and you study process flows, and you learn about the life cycle of information. And, that really does start to get into one of the channels into this profession. I moved, pretty quickly, from there into records management, which immerses you even more deeply into the information resources management milieu, and then I found that I was good at turnarounds. So, my career really began at the university in the office of the general council of the University of California in administration. And, because I turned out to be good at turnarounds, I kept getting bigger and stranger turnaround assignments, and finally found myself in the IT organization of the University of California.
GB: Wow, it seems like a lot of people kind of fall into the IT profession. It's very strange.
RK: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, there's no standard curriculum, and there are a couple of pathways. The orthodox one from my generation was you became a software engineer, and you moved up and you maybe went into systems analysis, and then you went into management, and then you went up the ladder. But, in fact, in the 70's and 80's, or 70's when I was coming up, this information resources management, so, focused more on the information side of the information systems equation than on the systems side. But, it was still, at that time, the minority pathway.
GB: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.
RK: So, I was always a little bit of an odd duck, because I worried more about the information, and I worried more about how universities worked, and I could fake my way through the technical stuff just well enough to not get caught most of the time.
GB: That's great. Was there anybody in your path that inspired you towards leadership?
RK: You know, that's a fun question, because it gets me thinking back. I've been very lucky. I remember once, actually, you may remember this, at EDUCAUSE, we did a team building exercise where we talked about famous people we had met, and everyone had one person, and I, of course, needed to talk about ten people. Because, I really have been pretty lucky. But, probably the most influential, and certainly the most formative, for me was my uncle Joe. My family background is I'm the son of Jewish immigrants, and they came to the country pretty poor around 1915. Six children and the oldest son, Joe, my uncle, was really a brilliant business man. And, he went to the University of Pittsburgh, but had to drop out, because his father had a nervous breakdown, and two of the brothers were in orphanages. So, they were dirt poor.
And, he and four of his brothers went on to create a Fortune 500 company, which is a pretty amazing thing. And, equally interesting in my mind, is he wound up becoming chair of the Board of Trustees at the University of Pittsburgh where he went to school, and was eternally grateful for the scholarship they had given him, and they gave him an honorary degree, because he never finished with a degree.
And, I'd like to think, I choose to think that I was his favorite nephew. He and I bonded pretty heavily. I was a Boy Scout and he was on the National Boy Scout Board, so he pinned my badges on me at the ceremonies, and he was the one that actually handed me my fake diploma when I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. And, on his death bed, actually, one of the more important milestone work products report I had written, I gave to him, and he read it on his death bed and we talked about it. So, he was a hugely influential, of course on my-
GB: That's amazing.
RK: And, it was all by example. He never said let me show you how to do this, but just the way he lived his life was inspirational to me. I had wonderful first CIO boss. Richard West is my good friend still, and retired as executive vice chancellor of the Cal State system. He was the CIO of the UC system at the time. And, he really, whatever good I had in my management style, I learned from Richard. He was a superb manager, and he did me a big favor. I don't know what it was about me, but Richard was one of a fast crowd of 10 to 15 leaders. Bob Hedrick, the president of EDUCOM. Bill Graves, who won the leadership award for EDUCAUSE two years ago and has passed away. Gary Augustson. Just wonderful, wonderful generation of top leaders, and Richard was among them. And, Richard somehow convinced them that I was somebody worth knowing. I was 28 at the time, or whatever, and they accepted me. So, I had this, sort of, council of uncles, that were kind of giving me responsibilities way beyond my pay grade, and editing my work. So, I have to thank Richard, always, for that. And, of course, you know Brian Hawkins. Brian showed me a whole different form of leadership. Brian, I teased him once and mentioned, since I have an MBA, the servant leadership. And, Brian, of course had done, unbeknownst to me, some of his academic publishing in that whole area, and Brian was a genuinely humble, self-effacing guy, and I could never be that. I'm a much more flamboyant person than Brian is. So, we actually were probably well matched to each other that way. But, Brian had the capacity to entertain ideas that he hated, and actually throw out what he came into any discussion with, really often in favor of ideas he might not even like, but seem to be better ideas.
GB: That's so rare nowadays, that's so rare.
RK: And, I got to tell you, I have tried to learn to bite my tongue and listen more and more, especially learning from the inspiration of Brian's style. I'll die, never having a tenth of what he had in that. And, that's really an unbelievable thing, to have people around the table with different ideas, you have your own ideas, you don't lose that, because you're the leader, but you don't get your idea to win every day, either. When you're the boss you'd like to think, well I'm the boss because I'm the smartest, and if I'm the smartest my ideas are always, or almost always, the best.
GB: Right, right.
RK: And, that's really not leadership, and Brian was a great, great example to me of how you do that.
GB: That's great.
RK: Yeah.
GB: Wow, yeah, I miss Brian. Miss his leadership.
RK: Yeah, me too.
GB: That's great. Sorry about my cat here, he's-
RK: I love your cat! I have my dog here, who was actually verbalizing before we connected, but you would have dog whimpers in the background.
GB: There's something about my cat who, especially when I'm doing something online, he's gotta, that's when he knows he wants to get involved. It's funny.
RK: Excellent.
GB: So, let me go back just real quickly to your uncle, because you talked about him creating a business, and him coming from poverty, really, and what would you say are one or two qualities that you got from him? What is it you feel like you learned from him?
RK: You know, that's a very interesting question. I consider myself, for both good and bad, as a bit of an audacious personality, and I think my audacity is part of my success. That, A, I think out of the box often, and B, I'm vain enough or stubborn enough, or persistent enough to continue pushing in the face of people's, often, discomfort in a way. That's a new, crazy idea Richard, we can't do that, and I think that, that's an audacious set of behaviors, often casts me in a minority role, which is, frankly, not always fun. But, in fact, if organizations don't care for and nurture their most audacious voices, at the very best they're going to live within the ordinary boundaries of their organizational culture. And, again, back to Brian. Brian was the reverse, whatever the reverse of audacity or audaciousness is, that's him, and so I think I made Brian constantly uncomfortable. And, to his is ever-loving credit, he knew that I was both stubborn enough, and right enough often enough that in spite of the discomfort I would cause him with my crazy ideas and my, you know, everybody in the heard would be going this way and Richard would be going that way. He would listen to Richard. I certainly didn't win every time, but I got my share and more than with most bosses.
RK: I got audacity from my uncle, and I also got... Well, let's leave it at audacity, I had another one, but we probably-
GB: No, that's great. That's a unique quality, that's not the run of the mill quality people talk to themselves, I like that. Now, don't really love this question, I didn't write it, but we'll do this
RK: We're going to cope.
GB: What would you say has been your greatest accomplishment? That's such a weird question.
RK: I know, and I really... It's so easy to reach in and grab your last-
GB: Right.
RK: Happy accomplishment and call it your greatest, because the memory's fresher. I mean, obviously, most of the EDUCAUSE community that's going to listen to part of this interview, is going to say ECAR, because that's, A, pretty recent, and, B, it landed with quite a momentous bag, and I loved it. ECAR, it has been a sort of fanatical drive in my career to help university administrators talk about their performance in a more quantitatively, rich way. Higher ed gets beat up hourly for substandard performance. Good enough for government work kind of things. I believe that, that's, to a very great extent, unfair. And, at the same time, we've never developed a language or a discipline behind that language, to communicate what we do and how well we do it. So, I've had that burning desire. I manifested that at the University of California in a three year project, and it was certainly behind my thinking at ECAR. And, I think that, to a great extent, the ECAR experiment, if you will, and again this is a thanks to Brian's support and the board's, that got off the ground. But, I think it was a successful experiment, and it gave CIO's an empirical capacity to make the case for whatever investments they were asking their provosts or leadership to invest in, in a new way. And, quite honestly, your reaction to my audacity answer is CIO's are a wonderful community. You know the EDUCAUSE community as well as I do and they're wonderful people. But, on the whole, they're probably not the world's best communicators. So, on one hand, you're probably asking for more money than most of the executive staff of any university, because you're buying large-scale computing equipment, and you've got armies of staff. And, on the other hand, you may not be a great communicator, and so you're going in and asking for big things and you don't have an impressive arsenal of ways to ask for it. And, then you don't have an impressive language arsenal with which to convey, look how well those investments we made performed. So, that's the long story short, both about ECAR and about a project called the Partnership For Performance that IBM and I unrolled at the University of California. Those are two of my big ones. The other one that was so magical is I worked with a group of University of California vice chancellors for business, budget officers and a few CIO's, to plan the tenth campus, actually tenth, eleventh and twelfth campus of the university, and to plan it's business architecture. We went about in the classical way of doing regression analysis and saying well, at this size we're going to need so many people in IT, and so many in HR, and so many in capital programs and so forth. But, at one point, one of the vice chancellors said that's all backwards looking and kind of reinventing all of our mistakes. The truth be known, if we were going to invent a university from scratch, would we really reproduce what we've created? As good as the University of California is, nobody's ever said gee, what a great administration, I think we out of package that up and sell them in volume. So, what we did at that point is throw away all of the work that we had done for the past months that was backward looking and say, let's start with a blank piece of paper and say what would we invent? So, that became a visioning exercise. The result of that became a document called Sustaining Excellence in the 21st Century, which CAUSE then published as it's second professional paper. And, that at least three of the university campuses adopted as their blue print, if you will, for their administration. And, then I would get calls out of the blue from the University of Toronto saying we've done it. And I'd say what have you done? Well, we took your blue print and we put it into practice.
That has to be an amazing feeling That document became kind of a major international signpost, if you will, and pretty much is what catapulted me, personally into the international limelight. Which is how I found my way into CAUSE. So, I'd say those projects were probably... I couldn't pick which singular one is my favorite. The key thing in this, Gerry, when I think about it is, the things that I feel best about are the things that are still there. So, campuses still write to me saying I'm still basically implementing Sustaining Excellence, and that's 1992. Or, the Partnership for Performance, which was 1994, still exists, they are still using the metrics across 15 different administrative categories, functions and nine campuses at UC. And, ECAR still, you know it's changed, but it's core mission is still intact. To me, if you're a leader you measure your success in legacies. It's what have you done that's got legs, you know? Anything that's kind of done and forgotten in 18 months I don't even put those in the win category.
GB: Right.
RK: You got to last five years for me to even consider it being on of my favorites.
GB: Well, that's got to be just a great feeling to have created something, and all these years later, see it still functioning as a living thing.
RK: Yep, and we're all around long enough. One of my dearest friends, my first hire in fact, just retired at Vice President of Cal State in Long Beach. She took over one of my responsibilities, and I remember getting invited to her dismantling of the award-winning program that I had mantled. So, you live long enough, you see your work undone, you see it superseded. I'm not so vain to think that it's going to be around in 50 years.
GB: Right.
RK: But, you do want to get a good five, ten, fifteen, twenty years out of a really good score.
GB: Yeah, that's great. Well, speaking of over the years, what are some of the changes in higher education, especially the higher ed IT community, that have made an impression on you over the years? Because, I feel like we live in quite a different world than even five, ten years ago.
RK: The coolest thing to me, Gerry, is that you don't have to be ancient. I'm no longer a young man, although, in my brain I am, but I've now been around long enough, probably 40 years, in this profession, and it's a profession that's only been around 50 or 55 years. So, I described how Richard West introduced me to his generation of top leaders, but I've also met Vint Cerf and that generation. So, I've managed to have a career that has been long enough in span to... I wasn't part of the white lab coat, ENIAC Whirlwind generation, but I was there from the next generation on. And so, there've been a huge number of changes. My first meeting of the common solutions group was probably around 1995, and CSG, as you know, is a small collection of like institutions whose mission, originally, was to find projects of sufficient commonality that they would invest and create a common solution. And, I don't know how many colleges are in that consortium, but when I went to my first meeting, there were probably 70 or 80 folks. We met in Boulder, and 69 of the folks were men and there was Jane Ryland, my boss at CAUSE. The president of CAUSE. And, I just remember meetings where it was seas of men, many wearing ties, many being sort of math, computer science, shoelaces untied, zippers open.
GB: Right, right.
RK: Just not your classic Bill Gates at age 24 kind of image of what computing and telecom were back in the day. And, within five years my boss was Jane, a woman. The chair of the board of CAUSE when I first came was Susan Foster at the University of Delaware. And, the first EDUCAUSE president, or chair of the board was Polley McClure. Annie Stunden and Jacqueline Brown shared the PD committee that I was staffed to. So, the first gigantic change was the emergence of women, both in the profession, but more importantly, in the leadership of the profession. Because, as I see the arch of how this profession, especially in higher education, is evolving, the magic is less and less about the invention of the technology or what I call tinkering. The first generations of IT professionals were male and they were tinkerers. What we need today is people who do partnering, and people who have the kind of skillsets that foster the capacity of organizations to embrace the technologies. And, those kinds of behaviors, they're not exclusive to women, but they are more evident, in my opinion, in women than they are in men. We need those kinds of qualities. The ability to really reach across tables, to really form relationships and to lower anxieties and fears that represent barriers to adoption of new technologies. Those are qualities that, at the very least, we can learn from women.
GB: Sure.
RK: So, I think we are seeing a more and more gender-friendly profession, certainly by no means there. On the other side, a couple things I'd worry about that are also changes is, well one, the kind of racial, ethnic makeup of the profession really hasn't changed.
GB: Right.
RK: If you read the studies from the NSF and so forth, women in STEM statistics are not going in the right direction. So, I don't know how we encourage more people of color to make their way into the professions. That hasn't changed. And, the other thing is that we're moving, I think, very quickly into a period as you see the so-called Cloud mature, that really the capacity to operate large-scale enterprise systems, networks and more is really moving very quickly, or should move quickly to the Cloud. This represents a huge change to the profession, because both the human scale of computing is changing so you don't necessarily want to build your army of 3Richard Katz400 people to operate campus computing organizations. And, the role of the leadership in a quote, "cloudified world", is also changing. So, let me stop there, but it is a very interesting... This profession's all about change. In an industry that's a thousand years old and all about constancy, which is what makes the, you know, that's the sweet tension of this career.
GB: Yeah. I got the last little bit of... I started college in '89. So, I just got the last little bit of the sense that everybody was building their own things. You had decentralized computing, you had the university computing center building their own servers. It felt more organic, but it was probably more imperfect, but now it feels like nobodies building anything, it's all third party stuff. I feel like that's a big change, and I feel like you touched on that a little bit.
RK: Well, yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, on one hand, and that started with the introduction of the PC, computing became personal, it became accessible, when you introduce the web it becomes visually rich, it becomes modernly, so to speak, easy.
GB: Right.
RK: All of the complexity, though, is actually behind the curtain.
GB: Exactly.
RK: Getting deeper, and deeper, and deeper, but what it means is that the complexity on one hand is beyond the reach of most college and universities, and it's drifted to it's beyond the reach of most companies. You get the Google's and the Apple's, gigantic behemoths have the capacity to move the needle on the technology. And, on the other hand, the user community, because things are getting easier and because they're now acculturated to a level of use, they're more and more independent, and less and less reliant on, I've got to call the help desk. I mean, who calls the help desk?
GB: Yeah, Google your question, you'll figure it out.
RK: Exactly, and so you have to ask yourself the question, well if my users don't need me the same way they did 15 years ago... I mean, when I started, you had to know how to set your DIP's, which is, for heaven's sake... And, I'm not a mechanical guy.
GB: Right.
RK: On the other hand, the deep technology is now so deep that you need a PhD in AI to be able to operate.
GB: Right.
RK: And, most institutions can't afford those people, but in fact, universities do, and will continue to need IT organizations. It's just that IT organizations and their leaders need to rethink what the needs are and how to satisfy them. Because, I think that's changing very, very quickly. And, if you keep solving the old problems, with the old organization, you're going to fairly soon find yourself isolated with very little support from your general campus leadership that says Microsoft can do this cheaper, Salesforce can do it cheaper, IBM can do it cheaper. Why are we doing this?
GB: Right, right. It's interesting stuff.
RK: It is interesting.
GB: Let me get to these other questions here really quick, we're running a little bit long, but that's okay. When you think about your career, what lessons have you learned that you'd like to pass along to maybe somebody starting in the field? Do you have anything? Any career advice for people?
RK: Well, that's reserved for, you know, they ask the winners of these awards to give a session at EDUCAUSE.
GB: Oh, right, yes.
RK: For years I said, oh I'm never going to get one of those, here's what I learned in my career.
GB: Right, right.
RK: And, I find myself writing a here's what I learned in my career speech. Yeah, I have some advice. I mean, I have this conversation with my wife all the time, but, honest to gosh, I mean this is not bull, Gerry, but I have actually loved every job I had. And, quite honestly, I dropped out of college and worked for a year wiping butts at a nursing home, and I even found things to love in being an orderly. And, that would be my first lesson is, there is something to love in every job, and it is your job to find it. So many people that I've worked with, and that you work with, they're sad sacks. They can't wait 'til five o'clock to get out of there, and they wake up in the morning groaning, dreading going into the office, and I have to say I've never felt that way. So, if you're really unhappy with your job, my advice is get out. If there's a circumstance that's controllable in your situation, fix it. Take responsibility for it, and do your best to fix it. If you can't fix it, revert to get out. But, basically, life is too short. You're probably not aware, but I nearly died three months ago. I had a fluke.
GB: Oh no.
RK: Staph infection, and emergency surgery and blah blah.
GB: Well, I'm glad you're okay.
RK: You don't have to wait for that kinda situation to realize, oh my gosh, I've been dragging my behind into the office for the past five years, and taking my fellow employees for granted, and not thanking God every day that I have this neat job. And, it'd be a better, happier world if everybody sort of followed that advice.
GB: Yeah, yeah.
RK: Richard West also taught me, which is a wonderful piffy insight, run until tackled. If you think you know what you need to do to do the right thing, chase it, chase it, run Forrest, run.
GB: That goes right along with audaciousness.
RK: And, it is my nature, and again, back to Brian and his leadership style, he understood that you can't keep Richard on a short leash.
GB: Right, right.
RK: So, he would just like, Richard, go down field and run your ass off and I'll get the ball to ya. And, I'm not really good at playbook number 362 or whatever.
GB: Right, right.
RK: But, I think most everybody's hearts in the right place, and they've got the competency. If you've got that and you're aligned with your mission of your organization, just do it. It's the Nike's advice. And then there's, John Patrick was an IBM exec., and he came up with, I think, great advice, which was think big, start simple and iterate fast.
And I think that, that's, you know, maybe Steve Jobs would've said that. So many organizations think and act incrementally in a world that's changing by leaps and bounds. I think we're in a time where we need big thinking, and that doesn't have to mean that you implement sloppy or anything like that, because that's not the same conversation. But, you at least need to put your vision to the future. Has to be a big one, has to be an audacious one, has to be an inspirational one and has to be one that kind of motivates people to follow you. Think of Columbus or any other. These people got on these rickety, old, wooden boats and went off to an ocean they thought had an edge that you'd fall off of.
GB: Right.
RK: What a sales job.
GB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. What's one characteristic you think every leader should possess?
RK: Again, I hate the questions with one, but I'll try to stick to it. I'll tell you the one thing this leader was committed to possessing, and that is, I think anyone that's worked for me will tell you that Richard was committed to excellence and quality in everything he did. And, he imposed that expectation, or assumption, on everyone that ever worked for him. I remember Brian once accused me, in a negative way, he said Richard, you're demanding. And, my answer to him was yes I am. I think I may have learned that from my Uncle Joe. If you didn't do a first class job, go back and do a first class job. The world's too full of schlock, and if you really want to move the needle in any important way in your life and your career, then do a better job than you can even imagine.
GB: Yeah, that's great advice.
RK: That's mine.
GB: I like that. This is a double question, it's the last question. What do you see coming in our industry in the next five years or so, and how can we prepare for the challenges ahead?
RK: It's a big one. We could do a whole hour on that one.
GB: Yeah, I know.
Richard Katz Well, I have to say that I'm both hopeful, fearful for the future. The fearfulness is, I just read a book on the demographics of higher ed, and quite honestly, they're fairly grim. We've got a baby bust. I forget his specific... He had an alliterative metaphor for the dearth of students and the pipeline to college and university, but there is one. It's been well understood and known for the demographics. You can plan decades in advance, and that will result in lowered political support for universities and colleges, which we're already suffering. Reduced funding, and increased polarization between the have universities and colleges and the have-nots. And, I worry a lot about the creation of a two caste system, where the elite institutions, the medallion institutions continue to pursue multi-billion dollar capital campaigns and get them, and sport 20, 30, 40 billion dollar endowments, while the rest of higher education scrambles for fewer and fewer students, doing more and more tuition discounting, and cutting more and more administrative staff and hiring more and more adjunct. That's a grim reality, and the grimness is not leavened by our incapacity to make more than incremental change. We need more than across the board, 4% budget cuts to deal with the reality that I just described. And, I think that technology holds the key to a non- capacity, to address the changing reality that I described. But again, technology without that capacity to win hearts and minds, and get the leadership of the institution to have the courage to act boldly, if you will, to be audacious, to break eggs, that all the technology in the world just becomes cost-additive and adds to the problem, not to the solution. So, that's the fearful side of my vision. The positive side is we are entering this third-wave, or whatever you want to call it, of technology that's big data, predictive analytics, AI, dot dot dot. And, that stuff really moves much more closely to the people side of the equation. What people do, how work is organized, processing people. And, if there's courage in the equation, the technologies are now getting mature enough to really facilitate dramatic change. But, once again, it's a question of which of our institutional leaders will have the guts to say, wow look at what they did at Georgia Tech, using AI chatbots to basically replace, let's not talk supplement, to replace TA's. And, that eight out of ten of the students, in the first iteration of this, didn't even know they were engaging online with a chatbot and not a human.
GB: Right.
RK: Now, if you can start to say how do we intelligently, thoughtfully, cautiously deploy AI chatbots for teaching, for counseling, for housing, for job placement, for any variety of things. Where people are saying, I don't understand this, can you explain? We could revolutionize the higher education workforce. Right now, instead, we hire more and more adjuncts, which, quite honestly, to me, is one of the great crimes or our time. We pay these people $2,000 to teach a course, and claim that we're preserving that great, personal touch of higher education.
GB: Right.
RK: Many of them have no office, students rarely see them in less than hundred to one ratios. It's not, in my mind, a high quality experience for the students. And, it's a, frankly, low quality experience \ for many of the adjuncts. And yet, we would tremble at the idea that we would use a chatbot instead.
GB: Right, we want it both ways it sounds like.
RK: Yeah, instead of a freeway flyer, or somebody sitting in a darkened department somewhere making less than minimum wage. I mean, it's just awful.
GB: It's terrible.
RK: The hopeful side of me is that our backs, frankly, will be pressed enough against the wall that some leaders somewhere will say enough. The model that we have been nurturing with great success for the past, let's say, post World War Two years in the U.S. is running out of steam very quickly. And, a host of new, exciting technologies are really showing their stuff. What needs to happen is we need to make some hard decisions, and we need to take on the blow back, and there will be. I would also predict there will be significant tension, we can call it, that's probably a euphemism, between the faculty and the administration as these new technologies start to prove out. But, what we can't do is what we've always done, which is to say, these are great technologies, they will augment our already great business model. Because, something's going to break. You can't keep adding cost, and decreasing students and raising prices.
GB: That's not a winning formula. I look at it as, not to get political about this, but we're so married to tradition. I mean, look at the electoral college, completely outdated system. We're never going to change it, because people don't understand, people are scared of a really new system. It creates suspicion, it creates fear, and so we just never change the actual skeleton of the system.
RK: Well, I couldn't agree with you more. What people don't realize in that scenario that you just described is that the consequences of doing nothing can often become much more frightening than the thing you fear that keeps you holding on to the status quo.
GB: So, last thing I want to ask you is how did you hear about the award? When did you find out you won, and were you surprised?
RK: Where was I? I got a call, I think I was in a meeting, I was a trustee of Ashford University. A dear friend of mine is president there, and I got a call from the chair of the EDUCAUSE Recognition Committee, and I won't ever forget her phraseology. She said, Richard, congratulations, I'm calling to say that you are a co-winner of this years award, and that our committee had to deal with a pool of talent that was wide and deep. Those were her words, and she conveyed to me that A, I was very qualified for the award, which I still don't see myself that way, but B, that it was a very, very deep and wide pool. So, I was very tickled. The other thing I won't forget is... As I said, I've always loved my work, and frankly, my work was always it's own reward. I would get up in front of EDUCAUSE and ECAR audiences and say, and I really meant it, I have the best job in the world. I didn't want Brian's job, I'm to audacious to be President of EDUCAUSE. I would say something and I'd wind up in trouble. I'm just not cautious enough, and I know that about myself and that's fine, because I had Brian to be my cover, because he is an adult. And, I could be that kind of child-like entrepreneur that worked at the edges of the organization where I have more degrees of freedom. And, that's where my style of leadership, and I think your the same way, you're definitely a-
GB: Yeah, I don't want to be in a political position. Yeah.
RK: Yeah.
GB: Definitely. Well, that's great. Congratulations on the award, and thank you for taking all this time to talk to me, it was very, very enjoyable and it's-
RK: Oh, it was a pleasure.
GB: Yeah, it's good to connect with you again, and like I said, I'm going to edit this minimally, and I'll send you a private YouTube link here in the next week or so.
RK: Yeah, you may need to use a blunter instrument. But, I'm blessing to do whatever needs to be done.
GB: Right on. Well, you have a good weekend, Richard, and thank you so much.
RK: Yeah, it was fun, Gerry, thanks a lot. You do, do this well. I knew that, but this brings another level of insight to that.
GB: Oh, well good. Thank you very much, I appreciate that.
RK: And, by the way, I'm good friends with Colin Currie, and I didn't know that Colin is working under your-
GB: Oh, yeah!
RK: And, he loves the work and he loves you.
GB: He loves doing that. I count on him every year, he's great, yeah.
RK: He is great, so I'm really glad that you're doing that with him.
GB: Cool, well maybe I'll see you in Denver, are you coming to the meeting?
RK: Oh, yeah, I will definitely look for ya.
GB: Cool, well I'll see ya soon, man.
RK: Thanks for doing this.
GB: Oh, sure. Thanks, man.
RK: Have a good weekend.
GB: You too, bye.