Shaping Tomorrow: CTA On The Future Of Technology, Supply Chain And CES 2025 Expectations

In this episode, join Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, and Dan McNutt, President of Technology at DHL Supply Chain, as they discuss the future of technology, the essential role of a supply chain board member and what to expect at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Transcript

Welcome to All Business No Boundaries, a collection of supply chain stories by DHL Supply Chain, the North American leader in contract logistics. I'm your host, Will Heywood. This is the place for in-depth discussions on the supply chain challenges keeping you up at night. We're breaking beyond the boundaries that are limiting your supply chain. Today's episode is Shaping Tomorrow: A Conversation with CTA on the Future of Technology, the Role of Supply Chain and What to Expect at CES 2025. Our guests are Gary Shapiro, CEO of Consumer Technology Association and Dan McNutt, President of Technology at DHL Supply Chain. Let's dive in.

Okay.

Dan, Gary, welcome. Glad to have you here with me, Dan. Gary's coming in from the D.C. area.

We'll start like we always do. I'll ask you each to introduce yourself, name, title, the organization that you're part of, and your role there. And then if you could tell us how long you've been, at the organization that you represent. And, Gary, since you're coming in from a little bit further away, we'll start with you.

So, I'm Gary Shapiro. I am the CEO of the Consumer Technology Association. It's a North American technology trade association, a nongovernmental entity, but a not-for-profit.

We own and produce the CES, the world's coolest, funniest, most interesting and exciting innovation event by far and probably the biggest trade event in the world.

And, what I've been here, since I was actually a student in Washington D.C. working for a firm that was a consultant way back in the late seventies.

And I came in as a full-time employee in the mid nineteen eighties and clawed my way to the top.

And, I'm thrilled to preside over the one of the largest trade associations in the Washington D.C. area and there's there's, like, literally thousands of them. And we're pretty well known for what we do, which is we have a very clear mission and that's to promote innovation, making the world better. And I think we're doing a pretty good job of it.

Great. Well, thanks for being here and with us. I'm looking forward to learning more about all of that as we carry on here. So, Dan, how about you?

Yeah. So, Dan McNutt, I am the President of our technology, business unit for North America, Dealing strictly in that space as a a lot of the other business, that we have deals across, ultimately, other market segments. I've been with the business now for, thirty seven years.

I've been in a lot of different segments of the business. So consumer, retail, e commerce, etcetera. Had a few, stints overseas and been in Columbus now since 2006.

Good. Well, welcome to the podcast. This is your first go around. Right?

Yes.

Yeah. And, speaking of firsts, I know we're gonna get into the meat of the discussion, but I think Gary's our first published author on the podcast. And I wanted to give you a chance, Gary, to tell us about your book and kinda how it came to be and what it's about.

Well, rather than look at my gleaming head, you can look at this beautiful cover, Pivot Or Die.

You can see it's how leaders thrive when everything changes.

It was it's inspired by the changes we all had to make during COVID, but certainly, it's it's based on four decades of dealing with the technology industry and getting to know the leaders and movers and shakers and seeing how they change and what works, what doesn't.

It's really about decision-making, especially for people in business, but it also covers our personal lives.

And we make a few big decisions in our lives, you know, like, for example, who we might marry, whether we have kids, whether we commit a felony, whether we do something fundamentally unsafe and get hurt. Those are super big personal decisions. But in business, we're always making decisions and some none of them ever have perfect information.

But they are risky and they do require a certain type of analysis and there's different types of decisions. And I talk about hundreds of decisions that have been made in the technology world and other areas.

And I break them down into basically four different types of decisions.

One is a success pivot.

Another is a failure pivot.

And then there's also a startup pivot.

And then there's the pivot that is, I'll get to in a second. But each of them has different ways of of dealing with making a decision.

You know, we talk about startups. We, although we have huge companies like DHL as members of ours, we have most of the big technology companies as members.

80% of our companies are small business, and a lot of the best ideas and quickest movement can come from small companies.

So, we as a matter of faith for your organization, we encourage entrepreneurship and innovators. We have a this trade show we produce, CES, has a special section called Eureka Park. We have over a thousand startups there and we really believe in the startup culture because every big company started out as a small company. And I've had that discussion with everyone from Bill Gates and Microsoft who credits trade shows like CES to helping their success to others as well. And it's, even the biggest companies in our members support the concept of smaller companies and helping them grow, which is a lot of what DHL does.

So there's a success pivot you have, though, where you are successful. Now, if it's your first success, you might be overconfident and think you're brilliant. But the truth is a lot of success pivots come after failures and failures are the teaching experiences that make the difference and then you can learn a lot from them. And I could talk about success pivots like Amazon shifting from, you know the way, it shifted from basically electronic seller of books to coming out.

I remember Jeff Bezos came to one of our meetings and he had this little device. I'm like, what's that? That's a Kindle. That's gonna change everything.

Like, why would you create your own competition? Well, obviously, it was brilliant and then they shifted to cloud computing. Or how Apple also is another great example of a company that shifts from, you know, they had a wonderful computer and they did something called an iPad, then an iPad, then an iPhone. I mean, they just kept shifting and shifting and now they're they get a lot of money from the services and platforms they have.

But there's literally hundreds of examples of success pivots, but there's some commonalities between them.

So, these pivots are, the failure pivot is one though that you learn from so much. And sometimes it's a hail Mary. Your company is about to go under. What do you do?

How could you survive from that? We give some examples of companies that have survived. And those are the different things that you talk about. Talk about a lot of the leadership traits, how we deal with people and then even in your own personal life, how you make decisions.

At my stage of my career, I find myself, advising a lot of younger Americans that are agonizing over what college they go to, for example, or what they major in or what their first job at. And reality is it's not that important. I mean, ultimately, you may meet your spouse there or change your life because you get a great teacher or something like that. But the truth is is that you don't even know who you are until you're, like, your late twenties or thirties.

But you each job you get, you learn something from. So, your first job is important because it's helping you learn what you like and what you don't like. So those are the kind of things we talk about in the book. It's The Wall Street Journal reviewed it.

It's, it's been on a bunch of bestseller lists. It's actually the it's my fourth one, but it's definitely doing better than any other in terms of the emotional responses getting from people.

That's great. Thank you for telling us that and congratulations on the book.

So decisions. Dan, I won't make you talk about any felony decisions that you made in your personal life, but you did make a decision to get affiliated with the CTA.

Yes.

And I just wonder if I'm a if I'm an average listener out there and I think DHL logistics and then CTA, electronics, how do those things come together? What was in your thinking there?

Well, it was really about visibility as well as relationships.

Because it's amazing as as we're out there in the industry and and looking for new business and things, how many people still don't understand what DHL Supply Chain does. So, I think I've explained to already five or six of the other board members when they've asked me, so DHL, you know, why be a part of of CTA?

And when you when I explain what we do, because, you know, with the business that I run, I mean, we strictly focus on technology companies.

We bring innovative solutions for them. We bring, experience, resources, speed.

We can do things that they can't do on their own and we specialize in that technology space. That's surprising because a lot of people think we're just the, we're the express delivery system, of the yellow vans and and parcels to your door. And we're really far from that. You know, we have five hundred sites in North America, over fifty thousand employees just in North America and we're the largest operator of, you know, warehouses in North America. So, that was a big part of it, was to get some visibility out there for us and also the access to what, the organization and association provides, which is, you know, some great market research, some great connections, some great advocacy, as well as getting the relationships through the other board members.

You, in a sense, it's mutual in a way because by becoming part of us, seeing what we do, getting nominated and elected to sit on our board, you've proven that you're an innovator.

Like, you're the first one in your category to do it. But we have a lot of other first like, why is Delta Airlines' Ed Bastian at CES doing what he's doing? He's gonna be speaking in the Sphere.

Several thousand seats in Las Vegas. First time a trade show ever has a keynote or speak there. It's his third time keynoting at CES. Why did he do it?

Because Delta had a strategy and that is to position themselves as the best technology driven airline. They wanted the business travelers. They wanted to be known as as a place where you could get work done. It was a personal mission of Ed's, which to have Wi-Fi in airplanes, which he worked on for years and he was so thrilled to announce it at CES.

And, of course, you know, they've had their ups and downs like every airline has, but they certainly are now known as the best-run airline. And, you know, he gets and Delta gets all sorts of awards and the things like that because they focus for the passengers on being best of class. And that's they have an attitude to phrase the organization and they're involved with us, the way DHL is and other companies. And if you look at some of the people who have spoken even at CES, they come from different categories.

There's agricultural, like John Deere and Caterpillar are part of part of who we are now. And also, there are people that do solving the world's biggest problems, like how you get water from air. Our last chairman had a company that literally invented and introduced to CES this amazing product that takes water out of the desert air, even in Las Vegas, Nevada. And now it's been that was five years ago, they introduce and that was deployed around the world in the poorest countries in the world and people are literally living because of this incredible technology.

But that's just one example of many of companies that got it. I mean, that guy who heads it is also running Bill Gates' biggest fund now on focusing on sustainability in the environment. And it's it's the kind of thing is, like, we are working with the United Nations to solve the world's problems, actually, whether it be the right to food, the right to clean air and clean water, the right to health care and the right to other things. And they added one last year at this time for us at the United General Assembly opening.

We were part of the press conference announcing that said we have added access to technology as a fundamental human security or right. So, we have a big mission, but it requires people who think outside the box to be part of our leadership.

And that's why, honestly, it was, it was great to invite Dan to sit on the board because he's part of that mix of incredible people that are so diverse in terms of what they do and understand this big picture of how the world runs. And it's important to be run well with technology efficiently and get all the benefits of technology to help solve some of these fundamental problems we have around the world.

It's interesting, Gary. Already with, working with a couple of the other board members' companies on technologies for deployment within DHL. So, with with Exeter and iFi, we see some opportunities there to leverage their new technologies within our business as well.

So, there is a lot of, you know, reciprocity there in the relationship building, etcetera that's really great.

Absolutely. And in relations with you know, one thing COVID, I think, taught all of us is that despite the fact that I in a sense, we both are working on technology as a solution to problems. Look. We're able to speak now, which we probably wouldn't have done this pre COVID this way.

We'd go I'd fly there and and do an interview with you and it would be, better probably. But we got used to the technology during COVID, but we also realized as leaders that you need face-to-face. You need relationships. You need the ability to share a meal or break bread or get to know someone as a person and you're more likely to trust them and wanna do business with them.

And that's it is, I am the paid cheerleader for the technology industry. But I also believe that you have to have face-to-face meetings. You have to have the serendipity of an event to explore new relationships and you can't do that online.

First, I'll share a little bit about some of the relationships and face-to-face that you're talking about. So, one of the other big events that CTA runs is Tech Week in D.C.

And, you know, I got to participate that in this past year. And it was just amazing the access that the association has to representatives and legislators in D.C. I mean, we had, you know, private sessions with some of these folks where we could express, you know, our real challenges in the business.

We had folks speak to us on cybersecurity, national security on artificial intelligence. And, it was just it's phenomenal, I think, what the association is capable of doing.

And then you're with, you know, other company leaders and really having strong discussions about what matters to North American businesses.

And, you know, that to me is another huge benefit of being part of the association.

Yeah. And I wanted to follow up on that a little bit. And maybe, Gary, as, CTA is not just CES, you guys do other things. Dan just alluded to one of those things. Maybe just a thumbnail sketch of the history of the organization, you know, what your kinda key objectives are, for your members and in key activities that you do to support those.

Sure. Thanks. Yeah. So we started out in 1924, one hundred years ago as the Radio Manufacturers Association.

Seems like everyone's celebrating their hundredth anniversary.

Next year, it will be Panasonic and Delta as keynoters celebrating their hundredth anniversary with a kickoff at CES.

But we started in a way because there was a proposed radio tax.

And, also, there was, some issues and policy issues being discovered. And we also wanted to count the radios sold, to be honest, to do some market research and forecasting.

And we after several name changes, we have the Consumer Technology Association. We're one of the largest associations in the Washington D.C. area by every measure, including, the number of companies we have and the staff and and what we do. And we have a we have a house on Capitol Hill called Innovation House. Legislators of both parties use it for various reasons. They're always going through it for whether it's a fundraiser they're hosting or coming to educational event. We produce a lot of them in many different categories.

But we focus in part of what we do is we count things. We estimate things. I spent an hour this morning in a meeting talking about forecasting of how our industry is going to do, the technology world's gonna do for the next year and revivals. And it's complicated because it's the most complicated meeting I ever had on it because there's so many unknowns, whether they be tariffs or interest rates.

And there's a lot there's more unknowns or known unknowns than we've ever had before and forecasting is a little bit more challenging than ever has been. We also, communicate a lot. We define things for the industry. We define what the back of a computer look like, the RS-232 standard.

We set a lot of standards, hundreds of standards. So, companies and consumers could do business together. We have energy saving standards. We have all sorts of health care standards.

We have standards that measure brain waves, measure sleep with all the health care devices coming up. They measure steps. So, consumers compare devices, in different ways until they'll work and they'll understand what they were. Obviously, we couldn't even plug in our products to electricity without standards and we have a whole set of engineers who work on those.

But we also do advocacy, which is, I think, what you what you both were just talking about. And our advocacy is focused on, you know, first, we want our government to do no harm, but second, we also want our government to take those policies which make innovation possible and not choked, because innovation by definition is changing the status quo. So, there are a lot of issues we're engaged in, but the big overriding one is a focus on innovation. And what does innovation require? I mean, it requires smart people who can think outside the box. And as Americans, frankly, I feel we're totally blessed with the fact that we have this amazing thing called the Constitution, allows us to speak our minds, allows us to lobby our members of Congress and give them information, why our views are important.

And we also have a culture of innovation here. We have a culture where starting a business and failing is actually an education. We're the only country in the world like that. Canada and Israel are distant second and the rest of the world is a far distant third.

Once you fail at a business, you're blacklisted in most countries. You're a failure. Here, if I when I hire someone, if they've done a startup or they've tried something, they've learned from it. They've gotten a real education.

You don't learn from your successes, going back to my book. You learn from your failures for the most part in life. That's the the tough learning we've all had to get to the positions we're in.

So, in terms of what we do in Washington and the state legislatures, we're out there trying to make sure that well- meaning legislators and there are they're usually well -meaning, don't just try to solve a problem by designing our products, which is often the case.

And they do try to design our products to solve problems that they see are real problems, but we have to make sure unless safety is involved, that, you know, they're not just dealing with some patent owner who wants their product mandated, which often happens, believe it or not, or something else. So, we're out there mostly on defense, but occasionally on offense. Part of the offense, though, is we have as a country, as an industry, as a country which is consumer purchasing based, we've been big advocates of free trade.

I have an economics degree, and I believe that, you know, nations have different strengths and you play off your strengths and weaknesses. Our strength is creativity and innovation.

We export a lot of great things in agriculture, but also in with movies and music and our culture is is known around the world. Our language, lucky for us, is known around the world.

But we have to figure out what it is what makes us great as a strategy and focus on that. That's what we advocate on. That's what we talk about, and there's, of course, a ton of related issues to that.

Yeah. That's a pretty impressive agenda that you have working.

Okay. So, I wanna shift gears to the big event that's coming up in, I think, about thirty days.

Consumer Electronics Show. Start with you, Dan. How does DHL show up at this? What are your objectives when you go to CES?

What's it like from your your standpoint? Sure.

Well, we're showing up in, with strength this year. I mean, we'll have, in excess of twenty-five folks, across really all of our market segments as well as from express, from from forwarding and from supply chain. And, again, I get back to really in in this case, it's two things. I mean, one is just visibility, you know, in the industry and this because it crosses all market segments, you know, consumer products, life sciences, health care, automotive, etcetera. You know, it's a great place for us to to get our name out there that we're we're part of the supply chain, solution for you.

And then it's really about us also looking and assessing at new technologies. So that's really exciting for us. So for the third year in a row, we're, we're a sponsor of the, the CTA member reception. This year, we're the, presentation sponsor, so the primary sponsor, if you will, for that event.

Last year, we had over a thousand attendees come to that, on the Tuesday night, which will be fantastic. We also have our global CIO, Sally Miller, who is presenting on, you know, robotics, cobots, automation and kinda how do you interface those with with humans, particularly in the the supply chain, which, you know, we spend, you know, a ton of time and a sizable amount of money looking at new innovations to support our business and advance efficiencies and deal with the challenges of labor, quality service, etcetera, every year. So, this is a place that, one, we have a voice at the event, but then we also can get around and see some of the new technologies that, we might wanna have a look at.

So, very big, event for us, particularly from where it was, you know, four years ago. I'm not sure we had anybody even attending. But we're there in a in a in a big way.

That's great. Yeah. I'll be attending for my first time this year. So, looking forward to that.

So, Gary, here's your opportunity to tell us a little bit more about the biggest, the funnest, some of the dimensions around the show. It's, you know, it's well known in the popular culture of being very large and very well attended. How many people go, sort of what does the footprint look like in Las Vegas? Just paint the picture for our listeners.

If you know those numbers. Yeah. Maybe you don't.

Yeah. Yeah. Roll of the dice.

Yeah. It's big.

It's big, but we also try to keep it small. We actually could get a lot more people, but we we do restrict the attendance.

Those viewers and listeners that are part of the technology industry are welcome to attend.

The business connection is not open to consumers. It's called CES. We're trying to get those three letters to, stand on their own and they do around the world. In the United States, that's probably referred to in other things by the media. But we have the the trademarks on CES and we're, we do get about a hundred forty thousand people.

We'll probably be in the one thirty to one hundred and fifty thousand range. That makes it the largest business event in the Americas, if not the world. Also, the footprint of the show will have over four thousand exhibitors and over two point five million net square feet of exhibit space. That also makes it the largest business event in the world.

So we also, we have we'll have over a thousand speakers.

People wanna follow along live can do so on ces.tech. There's a whole bunch of speakers that'll be streamed, some of the keynotes and what they're saying. You know, we do have the actually, the world's hottest company right now is Nvidia and the CEO is, I think, making his first major American address in a in a while at CES. This is his third time speaking there, though. I actually knew when he was small. I wish I was smart enough to have just put, like, ten bucks into his stock.

But it's, you know, that's where companies grow and there's a certain loyalty. A lot of our volunteers like, Dan, you know, they're volunteers.

But a lot of them are companies that actually started in a tiny booth at CES and now they they just wanna pay it back as a volunteer, to help us grow.

We will have, or we did have in the last event, over fifty thousand people from outside the United States come. So, it's great for the U.S. inbound tourism. It supports we're one of the few shows in the world that the U.S. is the dominant global event. We do have some, tiny events in Europe, in Paris and in Amsterdam and we occasionally go to other places.

But the CES is the big one. It's globally known and it is known as the world's innovation event. And it's something that we have managed to make equivalent to innovation in different ways and that's, you know, whether it's the partnership with the UN or our announcements of we'll be announcing actually as we do every two years, which country is the most innovative in the world. We'll have a bunch of ministers from those countries.

We'll have ambassadors from those countries to accept their awards, because every country wants to be like the U.S. So, our criteria, whether it's, the diversity of their population, their opportunities, what it costs to start a business, or, what, you know, what even their broadband deployment is or their other percent of educated population, things like that. The different criteria we look at and change modestly every couple years, but it's all laid out there. We do the same thing also with each of the fifty states.

We'll be announcing that in April. We rank how innovation- friendly there. We, of course, have different criteria because we all have the same constitution. We have a lot of the same laws, so we we look at different things.

And so, we as an organization do not ask the government for money for our industry and that's very rare in Washington. It allows us to focus on what's important, but, also, we feel that our economy, will drive our industry. The fact that, you know, we have efficient supply chains is extremely important and that's why DHL is such a great member and company to have out there because your focus on technology and efficiency and innovation is really important because that allows our consumers to to get products at a reasonable cost.

And it's important that we continue to innovate and do things using technology and best practices to make sure that we stay the strongest country in the world, frankly. And, that's my personal commitment to my grandkids and kids that I wanna carry on to the next generation. That's why we don't ask our government for money for our industry. So, I know I got off topic of CES.

It is great. We we're there in health care technology, artificial intelligence to dominate the show. Sustainability is is a big focus of what we're doing. Mobility is there.

We even have a Volvo. We have a Oshkosh, one of our newest exhibitors. They make fire engines and ambulances. We have so many different companies you wouldn't expect at a show called CES, but they're there because they're reaching the leaders, the thinkers, the, you know, the hundred and forty or thousands or so people that are there.

I mean, five thousand media from around the world. Several thousand investors of every level from the angel investors to those that are mutual fund run mutual funds that are looking for stocks or companies to invest in, to the engineers themselves. Obviously, the CXL level is the dominant, attendee at the show, but the retailers is there as well. You know, in our Eureka Park, we'll have Shark Tank will be there with at least two other people walking around and they're doing they're looking for people to get on the show.

They're doing tryouts there. But, also, like, in talking to this to the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillan, he says, I always walk around, Eureka Park. He says, our people come to the show. I've been coming for years.

It's it's a great event. So, you know, retailers, they all want the best the new thing and they they wanna everybody wants the and the big companies will be out there. They're looking sometimes to be the first customer of a start up. Like, DHL may see something that excites them that could help them, or they wanna maybe even invest, which is a lot of companies do, or they may wanna buy them, frankly.

But sometimes for a startup, it just takes that first contact with the big company that keeps them going. And that's why the big company and small company synergy has never been an issue.

My very first board meeting, the discussion was whether or not we raised the cost of CES. And I'll never forget the chairman of the board said, look. Our company is the biggest exhibitor.

You know, the exhibit cost is is like a rounding error for us. It doesn't matter, but we always have to have the show so that the smallest company, anybody with an idea in the garage or their basement, can expose it to the rest of the world. And that's a philosophy we operate under. Still to this day, we're always looking after the the small guy even though we have the big companies as all the almost all the big companies as members as well.

Yeah. Well, it sounds really exciting. I know Dan, in hallway conversations over the years, has reflected a lot of excitement that he's had for the event and I appreciate both of you coming on and kinda bringing that to life. And we'll look forward to, seeing both of you out in Las Vegas at shortly after the New Year.

Yeah. That'll be great.

Look forward to it. Alright. Well, thanks both for being here. Thank you. And really appreciate the discussion today and look forward to the next.

Alright. Thank you. Thank you, Gary.

Thank you so much. Will, Dan, I really appreciate the opportunity.

Thank you. Appreciate you.

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