Interview Date: September 30, 2024
Interviewer: Stewart Schley
Abstract
Dr. Ron Rizzuto talks about his 49-year career teaching at the University of Denver Daniels School of Business, and about the educational programs and research that connected him to the cable industry. He talks about the genesis of the Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) training programs that were unique in the industry, and the development of Time Warner Cable’s “Hamburger U.” for the company’s managers facing decentralization. Rizzuto discusses his research into the economics of municipal broadband systems and his conclusions. And he touches on the changes at the University of Denver over the years.
People and organizations mentioned include June Travis, Gail Sermersheim, Lucille Larkin, Priscilla Walker, Mike Wirth, Joe Collins, John Sie, Barry Elson, American Television and Communications (ATC), National Association for Multi-ethnicity in Communications (NAMIC), Penn State University, CableLabs, and CTAM.
Interview Transcript
STEWART SCHLEY: Hello everyone. I am Stewart Schley on behalf of Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center. Delighted today, on the last day of September of 2024, to be able to converse with a gentleman I know as “The Professor” and I think other people know as “The Professor.” Ron Rizzuto recently retired after a long much decorated career in academia principally with the University of Denver and the Daniels College of Business, an individual with a rich history of academic study and consultation in the cable industry. So, first of all Ron, congratulations on reaching that point in life.
RON RIZZUTO: Thank you, Stewart.
SCHLEY: And we’re delighted to have you. We’re going to talk a lot about your role both inside and external to the cable business. Let me set the stage. Ron, you received a Bachelor of Science degree in finance from CU Boulder, University of Colorado Boulder, and followed with an MBA at New York University in the early ’70s. And then you did what everybody who has an advanced academic degree does, you drove a taxicab in New York City. (laughter) Tell me about that a little bit.
RIZZUTO: Well, I was interested to — I needed a part time job and I figured this would be interesting. And then I had a chauffer’s license because I had one with our family business. So, if you had a chauffer’s license, all you need to do is do the hack license. And the hack license was just a matter of taking the test, a written test where you had to demonstrate you knew where things were in New York. And you could do that because you had to identify 10 locations, where are they, but you didn’t have to identify how to get there.
SCHLEY: Wow. Okay.
RIZZUTO: And so that was a killer. My first fare in New York, it was an emergency, they wanted to go Roosevelt Hospital and the lady stopped me and said, “Can you take me to Roosevelt Hospital?” And I said, “I have no idea how to get there.” So, I stopped the cops who were on the street and they told me how to get there. Of course, she was mad, I didn’t get a tip. (laughter) That was my —
SCHLEY: You drove through all five boroughs and all around?
RIZZUTO: Yes.
SCHLEY: Give me, if you would, one thing you learned about humanity, about getting along with people, what was a takeaway?
RIZZUTO: Well, I think what you find is it reinforces your faith in humanity because 95 percent of the people are just first rate. In fact, at the end of the cab fare, you would say, “Geez, I’d like to spend more time with him.” And then the others you find one short cab ride is sufficient (laughter) in terms of your exposure to that person.
SCHLEY: Good takeaways. Your career in academia, I think in the mid ‘70s you started at DU as a professor of finance, is that correct?
RIZZUTO: Exactly.
SCHLEY: Okay. And then continued on lecturing, advising students. You’ve worked with thousands of students. But why are you here? This is a cable industry interview, I’m talking about taxicabs and academia. How did you begin to intersect with the cable business?
RIZZUTO: Well, really the intersection is our executive MBA program at DU, June Travis was in the executive MBA program when I was teaching. I think it was ’75, ’76 she was in the class. And then when ATC Time Warner was starting to decentralize, she reached back to me and said, “Can you help us put together a class?” And that was what has —
SCHLEY: Perfect.
RIZZUTO: — become affectionately referred to as Hamburger U. And so, we developed that curriculum for Time Warner and we did it in various forms. And it was a two week course, it was an immersion course where the new division presidents, they knew a lot about operations, but they didn’t know about managing the company. Because Joe Collins who was head of ATC, he wanted to make sure — and June Travis had wanted to make sure people knew how to manage the accounting functions so that it could be totally decentralized.
SCHLEY: And ATC is shorthand for American Television and Communications, was the predecessor of what became Time Warner Cable.
RIZZUTO: Time Warner Cable.
SCHLEY: And who was June at the time?
RIZZUTO: June was Senior Vice President of Communications.
SCHLEY: She was high level management with ATC.
RIZZUTO: Exactly.
SCHLEY: Was this sort of your introduction to the economics and the fundamentals of what we called cable television at the time?
RIZZUTO: It was because we didn’t understand anything about cable. And so, in order to do the Hamburger U, we had to learn about the industry. And so, we could learn the industry and then see how the traditional finance curriculum applied. So, we learned that and so that was sort of the stepping stone, and then June was part of the team that founded WICT [Women in Cable Telecommunications], so they did the management conferences. So, she said, “Why don’t you take what you’ve learned at Time Warner and let’s develop a cable curriculum for WICT that is cable. Because prior to that, the WICT would take — they would have an annual conference, but it was at Wharton or Penn State. And the curriculum was just out of the text book, “Here’s finance, here’s accounting.”
SCHLEY: And your expertise to date had been in capital formation, returns on investment and the rudiments of finance at a high level. What struck you about cable as interesting when you began to understand the business model behind it?
RIZZUTO: I think the thing that’s interesting is everything applied and it was fast paced, everything changed. We would write case studies and my colleagues would say, “Are you going to use that again?” I said, “It’s not relevant.” (laughs) So, it was fast paced, it was a great learning environment.
SCHLEY: And this was when, Ron, these were the go-go years of what?
RIZZUTO: A lot of this was, 1982 is when we got involved with the industry and on from there.
SCHLEY: Did you find it interesting just from an intellectual standpoint? Cable was becoming a thing, right, it was becoming prevalent across the U.S. There had to be I think some sort of connection or fascination with this budding media category.
RIZZUTO: Again, it was the fact that it was budding media, the industry is tough as nails, they had a lot to overcome, and you could see how creative they were in terms of dealing with it. And everything was changing, so a very fast paced change. And the people were just great to work with.
SCHLEY: Very camaraderie sort of based business.
RIZZUTO: Exactly.
SCHLEY: Cable just fundamentally then, mostly a single product business, right?
RIZZUTO: Exactly, it was one way video.
SCHLEY: And a subscription model.
RIZZUTO: Right.
SCHLEY: So, there was this recurring revenue element that you don’t see always in retail, in transportation, in banking, which undergirds the business I think. From there, you mentioned the Women in Cable Telecommunications alliances and conferences, but you kind of stuck around, you stayed with this industry and with this category in different guises. What were some of the things that you were working on?
RIZZUTO: Well, we had started with the Hamburger U and Time Warner, so we —
SCHLEY: I love Hamburger U, a reference to the McDonald’s training institute, right?
RIZZUTO: Yeah. And the credit for that name is Joe Collins, he said, “We need something like that.” But I was involved there and then got involved with WICT. And WICT had an annual conference, so I would help with the curriculum there, and then you would get involved with other companies like Jones Intercable or NAMIC [National Association for Multi-ethnicity in Communications]. Because these were people in the industry and they said, “Can you help us with this?”
SCHLEY: Ron, why do you think there was, I don’t know if I’d say a vacuum, but definitely the level of finance expertise in the industry maybe wasn’t at the level you’d find in other business? Is it just because this was such an operations-oriented business?
RIZZUTO: Yeah, it was the operations — at the top level, senior level, the finance was always competitive with any other industry.
SCHLEY: At the corporate level.
RIZZUTO: At the corporate level. But at the operations level, it was very financial, but the people didn’t have the background. So, there was a vacuum in the curriculum for that. And then in there, just in terms of training, a lot of companies relied on WICT for training.
SCHLEY: I did not realize that.
RIZZUTO: Yep. The only companies that had learning and education groups were Comcast, Cox, CTAM [Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing] had some, but WICT found a niche where there were people at all levels of the organization that needed to know and so the curriculum that we built there was —
SCHLEY: Could you sense that you were making a difference, and what was sort of rewarding about doing that work?
RIZZUTO: Well, I think we felt like we were making a difference and not only in terms of teaching people, but we were helping people teach others. Because when we did the WICT curriculum, we did the program, but then we recruited guys like Barry Elson, they recruited senior people from the industry who would help teach the operation. And we found the case study was a great way to do it as well as to make things relevant.
SCHLEY: So, you had this kind of ripple effect I guess across a broad spectrum.
RIZZUTO: That’s right. And a lot of people in the industry we found who were good professionals, and they were also good teachers.
SCHLEY: Yeah. Okay. How did your relationship with what is now Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center begin to take shape with the Cable Center?
RIZZUTO: Sure. Again, with that, again the things that we did with WICT and Time Warner were done through the Executive Education Center at DU. And then when the Cable Center moved to DU —
SCHLEY: From Pennsylvania.
RIZZUTO: From Penn State. Then we essentially said, “Let’s aggregate it here,” so we brought the training dimension to the Cable Center.
SCHLEY: That’s been a long lasting and close relationship for you and your team for some time.
RIZZUTO: Yeah, I mean I’ve worked with Cable Center, it’s been great to work with the industry and then work through the Cable Center to continue the work with the industry.
SCHLEY: Yeah, it’s impossible, but did you ever calculate how many lives and careers you’ve influenced both as an instructor and a professor of finance and with your work, thousands?
RIZZUTO: I know it’s thousands. I’m just now going through and cleaning out my files, so —
SCHLEY: As one does.
RIZZUTO: — in six months I’ll give you a better answer to that then.
SCHLEY: We should point out Ron, we talk about DU, University of Denver, how long would it take you to walk to your former office from where you sit right now?
RIZZUTO: Oh, from here it would take 10 minutes.
SCHLEY: We’re right here I guess is my point.
RIZZUTO: Exactly, we’re right here, right.
SCHLEY: I think around the time I got to know you a little bit, one of the really focused and I thought fascinating areas of study you engaged in had to do with this category we called overbuilds, and particularly municipal overbuilds. Before we talk about it, can you explain what that term even refers to?
RIZZUTO: Yeah. What it is the community, particularly the city government would put in their own cable plant and compete with the cable industry. And so again, when we got started there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the industry because —
SCHLEY: Service wise.
RIZZUTO: Service wise, service was bad, a lot of communities wanted more, and that was — capital — because all of the capital was on the back of the industry. So there was a lot of dissatisfaction and so four communities stepped forward, Glasgow, Kentucky, Paragould, Arkansas, Negaunee, Michigan and Cedar Falls, Iowa where they stepped forward and that sort of led to a lot of interest about this. And then that’s where I got started. Pete Gatseos, who was Senior VP of Strategic Research at TCI, he said, “We need to do something about it. Can you write a book or something where we can get the word out there that this doesn’t make any sense?”
SCHLEY: What was the rationale? There was almost this sort of utopian vision that prevailed for a while about, “We can play a role in this business, or even take over this business.” Why did Paragould, for instance, even begin to contemplate a municipal overbuild?
RIZZUTO: Well, thought, “We can do this, we can do that. We can keep the money in the community and we can do whatever we want.” Of course, they forgot it’s a business you have to run and you didn’t have enough customers. And so consequently that led to a lot of cross subsidies in the industry. And so a lot of it would focus on what is the economics, what are you — are you really earning, is it a standalone entity?
SCHLEY: And behind this is just a core precept, but not everybody always understood it, the reason there was typically one provider to a market, is to achieve any sort of payback, you couldn’t split up the customer base.
RIZZUTO: That’s right. The expenses were such that you couldn’t — and particularly when you only had one — when it was video only, you only had one revenue stream. As there are more revenue streams, you can have competition and be economic.
SCHLEY: But when you began to do the work that Mr. Gatseos inspired, it was still a one service business.
RIZZUTO: One way plant, yeah.
SCHLEY: You had maybe a year or so to do a lot of research and a lot of looking and analysis. How did you begin, what was the process of that project?
RIZZUTO: We looked at what had been done in —
SCHLEY: In those four communities?
RIZZUTO: Well, we did that, but we looked at what the research said and Marty Malarkey and Strategis organization, they had done some of the work. And then we then went to the communities and read the articles that were done there and what the write-up would have been, and then whatever financial information we could find.
SCHLEY: Which was no mean feat. Not everybody was entirely open I think about what you wanted from them.
RIZZUTO: Exactly. I guess we had freedom of information back then, but it meant a lot of different things to communities and a lot of it is, “It’s our community and we’re not giving it to you.”
SCHLEY: “You’re a guy from Denver invading our town. What do we have to do with you?” What did you conclude though Ron, what were some of the end findings of the first work you did in municipal broadband?
RIZZUTO: We concluded it was not economic, with one service it was not economic. The only way you could do that was to cross subsidize it and — or the community not cross subsidize it, but run the operation at a loss. So, you saw communities that had a good power operation, but they sacrificed the income there in order to subsidize.
SCHLEY: And that was usually the pairing, it was an involvement of the utility company or the power company —
RIZZUTO: The power company.
SCHLEY: — would be a player here. Was that fact well appreciated early on that these were going to be run at loss and there was going to have to be — you got to pay the bills somehow?
RIZZUTO: It was appreciated by the cable industry. (laughter) Because they said, “We don’t compete in a market where there’s somebody already because we know it’s not economic.” But the communities, they didn’t appreciate it, and then they spent all their time denying that they had to provide funding for it.
SCHLEY: You mentioned this was sort of in the day of pretty much a one product business. Has the calculation changed do you think?
RIZZUTO: It has changed. Since you’ve gotten commercial overbuilders like a WideOpenWest and Knology. With more than one service, they can make it a breakeven proposition. But there again, it’s still very tough.
SCHLEY: Do you believe the work had influence on perceptions of the municipal overbuild category, the work that you guys did?
RIZZUTO: I think it did, we sent the work out, we sent the information out. Still a lot of communities went ahead. Alameda, California is one.
SCHLEY: Well, even in Colorado, we have a couple of communities, right?
RIZZUTO: We have Longmont, you have Fort Collins, you have Loveland. And again, Colorado was late to the party. There are others where they knew it long ago, but they ignored the information.
SCHLEY: We were talking about this single product orientation that began to change dramatically in the early to mid-1990s. And you did some work that was pretty fascinating I think with CableLabs in helping to understand as we migrated from this one way video, one product, people were paying 30, 40 dollars a month, I don’t know, for cable service, to this idea that these networks could do more, right. They could become bidirectional, they could become two way, they could support new businesses. What was that engagement all about and what were you finding?
RIZZUTO: Well, what that was is again the — Scott Bachman who was I think VP of Operations for CableLabs —
SCHLEY: CableLabs, yeah.
RIZZUTO: — he worked with the operators looking at strategy. And so, he wanted us to help them model out what it could look like. Again, you had Dave Reed and other senior people, consultants, look at just the overall strategy of this, but we did sort of the nitty-gritty modelling. Involved were Brad Johnson, former SVP for Warner Communications; David Harrison, who worked for Scott at CableLabs; and Craig Moseley, who was a student at DU at the time. And so, we built the models in conjunction with the engineering community to look at what it would look like, what would the migration look like. And it was clear that of all the products that could come, the one that had the viability was high-speed data, because you didn’t have the programming cost, it was basically just the operations and you could piggyback on the video operations.
SCHLEY: Was that commonly understood early on or did that recognition take a while to gel would you say?
RIZZUTO: I think it was recognized very quickly. The engineers, Brad Johnson was the engineer who was at Warner Cable, he was working on our team with that, and he said, “This is a no brainer, this business.” (laughs)
SCHLEY: Well, it’s interesting to me because we had this budding fascination with “going online.” It was clear there was consumer demand, but we had these really frustrating throttled networks. You remember the screech of your modem back in the day.
RIZZUTO: Yeah, exactly. I do.
SCHLEY: And so, you talked about the absence of programming costs, so the margins were very different on this business versus video, correct?
RIZZUTO: Yeah, because the video business you had margins of maybe 30 percent, cash flow margins. But this one you had a margin of 70 percent because there the operating costs were much smaller.
SCHLEY: But high-speed data wasn’t the only consideration, telephony was a bright spot.
RIZZUTO: That’s right, we looked at telephony, we looked at Voice Over IP, but then we also looked at just switched telephony. And it was clear switch telephony was going to be a tough business because you needed to power the systems in order to run, so the —
SCHLEY: Powering was tricky.
RIZZUTO: Powering, you had to have the backup powering and then you had to have the power to ring the phone.
SCHLEY: Yeah, yeah, and always on.
RIZZUTO: Exactly.
SCHLEY: You had no latitude for error. When you talk about the model you built, did that go down even to the level of costs per mile, or how did you get to the economics of it?
RIZZUTO: It was detailed where we looked at what equipment do you need, and so you aggregated up from there. You could get to a cost per mile, but we didn’t model at the aggregate level at a cost per mile, we modelled it at a very detailed level.
SCHLEY: And again, kind of the same question, what was the influence or sort of impact of your work would you say in that category?
RIZZUTO: Well, I think people began to look at, “We can do this. We can understand the business.” We did it for CableLabs and the operators, they could see that it worked. Obviously, the Comcasts and Coxes, they had already gone down the road here. But for the independent operators, they could see it was a business. And then similarly when we did the high-speed data conference for the independent cable operators, they could then see there are lots of ways to do this and it’s a viable business.
SCHLEY: There had to be confidence because again, just to state the obvious, the capital required to retool these networks was not modest, right?
RIZZUTO: Right.
SCHLEY: We spent a lot of money in this industry.
RIZZUTO: That’s right, we spent a lot of money, but we had a lot of money in place that we could piggyback on, but still you had to spend a lot of money. You didn’t have modems, you didn’t have routers, you didn’t have switches.
SCHLEY: But it’s a beautiful point because I think the late Paul Kagan used to describe cable as a parlay business, you used the term piggyback. But just color that up a little bit, what does that mean, we had something in place, we were able to add to it?
RIZZUTO: Yeah, the incremental capital costs were not as great as building the network from scratch. And so, I think that’s what you saw, that’s what the industry realized is we have something in place that serves the video one way business, but that becomes the backbone for us to build into other business.
SCHLEY: And you had real revenue flowing from that native business —
RIZZUTO: Exactly.
SCHLEY: — obviously. You mentioned the fast pace earlier of this business and the constant change. What was fun about it? I presume you could have gone down another path and you would be a learned economist helping people in the fashion business let’s just say, whatever. What was fun about it?
RIZZUTO: It was fun to see how the technology in the business would change, the competitive landscape would change and sort of the can-do attitude of the people in the industry. Because we met a lot of people in the industry who maybe they had been in the service, so they had a little exposure to communications, they figured they could learn the business and they were good at the technology, but then they were also good communicators and teachers.
SCHLEY: Yeah. Ron, you’ve mentioned a couple of names, June Travis being someone who sort of was a bridge for you to the cable industry. Who else looms large in your career would you say that was a person of influence, or perhaps a mentor?
RIZZUTO: Well, again, people who sort of have opened doors in the strategy level, you had June, Gail Sermersheim and Lucelle Larkin I think. They were starting with WICT and they got me involved with WICT. And then because June was involved, Priscilla Walker worked for June, she sort of drove the Hamburger U as well as the Women in Cable forward. And then you had some people from the industry, Barry Elson who was at Cox, they got very involved with the curriculum and the teaching. But just a host of people, but those to name a few.
SCHLEY: And not to be maudlin about it, but it appears from what you’re telling me that this industry did make room for an allowance for women to rise up as people of influence in this broad sort of training progression that we have.
RIZZUTO: Exactly. And in there the CTAM, Comcast and Cox had training, but it wasn’t broad enough. A lot of the focus of the training was on installers and CSRs. So, as you sort of broaden that out, CTAM and Cox and Comcast would do this, but then WICT became the vehicle where you could teach managerial skills, marketing.
SCHLEY: Absolutely.
RIZZUTO: And we had no curriculum, so people from the industry helped create that curriculum.
SCHLEY: Absolutely. I’m curious if it worked both ways. You took your knowledge of finance and economics and helped to translate those to the people in the cable industry. Did some of your learnings about cable infiltrate your own classroom at DU?
RIZZUTO: Absolutely because we do cases, where we’d do merger cases, we used the Storer case as part of – Julian [Brodsky] and I wrote that case and we used it for class. We used what we learned about mergers in there. We learned a lot about capital budgeting and we incorporated that. Because we were teaching the capital budgeting, but we could teach it within the context of the engineering. “Here’s an engineering problem and here’s how you can use your finance skills to analyze the problem.” And then later on we used it in terms of customer care, in terms of customer lifetime value.
SCHLEY: So, they were getting exposure to — these weren’t fictional case studies, these were real transactions.
RIZZUTO: Exactly. And then that was a great — because then it provided an entrée for a lot of DU students to go to work in the industry.
SCHLEY: Absolutely, there’s a big presence there. What did you love, I presume you loved something about teaching and lecturing and advising young people?
RIZZUTO: You always like to see people when they get it. They’re struggling and then you provide something to read or a concept, and to see that light bulb go off and then unleash their own energy.
SCHLEY: What would you say to a undergraduate student across the street at DU about career opportunities, job prospects, satisfaction of a professional life in today’s cable business?
RIZZUTO: I think it’s a good place to start, it’s an industry that historically and still does provide an opportunity for you to get started. And so there you may not be doing marketing, but you may be doing — you’re applying your skills on the operations side. And to that point, I work with a Media Tech Collective, and we look to recruit young people to the industry. And so, the Media Tech Collective, we did a case study this last year, a case study on using artificial intelligence in the customer care area. AI is important and so there they’re learning, “How do I use what I’m learning?” within a practical context.
SCHLEY: Fantastic. Thank you for bringing that subject up. But, what’s one example of how within a telecommunications environment or a cable environment AI is already playing a role in the customer care side? What do we do with this tech, what are we using it for?
RIZZUTO: Well, I think what you’re finding is — where last year’s case study was focused on how do you take AI — people call in to a call center and usually they would get a person.
SCHLEY: Ultimately.
RIZZUTO: Ultimately, or they would get voicemail. And so how do you take your message, convert it into a conversation that you can then share that with a customer care person. So, you’re much further on rather than leaving a message or, “Here’s what I’m calling about,” and someone has to get back to you.
SCHLEY: It’s kind of done my advance homework for me and now I can hopefully respond more quickly or efficiently to the concern that the person has.
RIZZUTO: Exactly.
SCHLEY: There’s a gentleman named John Sie who looms large in the modern history of the cable business. John was a senior lieutenant for the mighty TCI and worked on everything from high definition television to pay television. He didn’t not touch many aspects of this business. What role does John play in your world and how did you guys begin to sort of collaborate?
RIZZUTO: Well, I met John with some things I was doing in the industry, and also John would be very helpful in speaking to various groups, the NAMIC group or — and in there, John was interested in providing some giveback to China. So, he created this Chinese Executive Program.
SCHLEY: I remember, right.
RIZZUTO: And so we helped build the curriculum for that. Again, the Chinese government recruited media executives who would then come and study here in the U.S. And so we did that and then in 2016, John established the chair because John funded it out of — he created a small fund, but it was not sufficient for long term. So John and Anna created an endowed chair where you had money to run the operation, but then also run the program.
SCHLEY: And it’s listed on my bullet sheet as the Ron Rizzuto Chair for Excellence in International Executive Education. Does that sound right?
RIZZUTO: Yeah, that’s right. And the head of that is Dr. Tracy Xu, she’s my colleague who’s taken over that program. The Chinese program, we signed the agreement with the Chinese government in 2016 and we did the program in 2017 and 2018. And then we went into a deep freeze because of Covid.
SCHLEY: Oh right, of course.
RIZZUTO: And so, we just restarted it and so some people may ask, “Well, you’re sort of starting it at a bad time.” But I think that is John Sie’s desire to build friendships.
SCHLEY: Absolutely.
RIZZUTO: And this is really part of building friendships. And the group that was here — I mean resuscitated it or we got all back together this summer. You see the willingness on both sides and the friendships become sort of the cement that holds everything together.
SCHLEY: Yeah. What are you going to do, not do it? Give up the ghost?
RIZZUTO: That’s right.
SCHLEY: How does that help anybody? I don’t know.
RIZZUTO: Exactly.
SCHLEY: Years ago, you were very helpful in collaborating with the Cable Center on a series of conferences, I think they were called the Academic Seminars, and they were presented to academics such as yourself as a subset of the big cable industry national convention. And what impressed me about that is there were a lot of Ron Rizzutos around the world who were integrating cable stuff into their curriculum. And I’m just curious if that’s the case or what have you seen there?
RIZZUTO: We’ve lost track of that because the Academic Seminar, as we would call it, we usually did a session in conjunction with the Cable Show.
SCHLEY: Exactly, right.
RIZZUTO: We would do it before so the academics would come, they got a free pass to the Cable Show.
SCHLEY: And they’d hang around. Right.
RIZZUTO: Exactly. And they talked. A lot of the people were out of the media or communications program, and so we got folks together.
SCHLEY: I remember some of the names, Mike Wirth and other colleagues of yours.
RIZZUTO: Yeah, Mike Wirth and Pat Parsons, a lot of the people at Penn State. That was sort of our segue from Penn State to DU is we could work with them on the academic conference.
SCHLEY: But the world of cable is so diffused now and as you pointed out earlier, we have competitors, we have frenemies. So maybe the focus around “cable” is dissipated a little bit in the academic world.
RIZZUTO: Yeah. You need a different name and you need something that brings it all together. If you look at the research, a lot of the researchers in the communication space to sort of see what they’re doing, a lot of it is programming related, some of it is cable, the traditional cable space.
SCHLEY: In that vein Ron, what do you see as kind of near term, but them maybe even futuristic roles and opportunities for this industry to play? It’s interesting that you come from the world originally of one-way single product video and now (mimics explosion sound) we do a lot of different things. But what do you see coming down the pipe?
RIZZUTO: Well, I think you’re going to see the industry continue to play a major role. Obviously, there’s going to be a lot of consolidation. Cable is in a prime spot to drive the future. And so, with that, to hitch your wagon to a Comcast or a Charter or a company like that, or even a regional company, a lot of the smaller companies, there’s going to be consolidation, but there’s still going to be a business to run and operate.
SCHLEY: At a large scale.
RIZZUTO: At a large scale, yes.
SCHLEY: Yeah. What is the rationale for continuing consolidation, asking a professor of finance, what’s behind that?
RIZZUTO: Well, I think the capital costs continue to escalate as well as the competition. And so, you need to find a way to — and similarly, the call centers, customer care is 24 by 7 and you don’t do that if you’ve got a cable system in a local town.
SCHLEY: Having to support its own — yeah.
RIZZUTO: Exactly. So, you need it for the scale of 24 by 7, you need it for the technology. That’s why I say there’s continued consolidation.
SCHLEY: I believe, and correct me if I’m wrong that you may have a grandchild on the way or recently arrived, but —
RIZZUTO: Recently arrived.
SCHLEY: Oh, congratulations.
RIZZUTO: Thank you.
SCHLEY: Will that human being experience a 3D hologram in his or her living room someday that’s delivered over the vastly expanded broadband pipe?
RIZZUTO: I’m sure, or technology that is not there. Right now —
SCHLEY: Yeah, we can’t even necessarily identify.
RIZZUTO: Yeah. But yeah, I think there’s no limit. I think CableLabs, they put together a video that looks at the future and the star in the video is Ron Howard’s father. In terms of what that would look like. So, I think you can begin to imagine what older people would experience, but then a comparable video, what young people would.
SCHLEY: I think the Ron Howard’s father video, a starring role was played by sort of a robot or a personal assistant or some little creature that was very helpful and very friendly to one’s life. And that’s the kind of stuff that, geez, when you and I started in this business, you would have been laughed at to talk about that stuff.
RIZZUTO: (laughs) Exactly.
SCHLEY: Knowing that there are a fair number of students and young people watching this interview, one thing that’s always characterized you in terms of my perception is your ability to stay calm. I don’t know if that resonates with you. But you talk about this frenetic pace of business life and certainly in an industry like media and telecom it changes by the day. How have you brought this sense of sort of chill to what you do and yet continued to have such an impact on the environment?
RIZZUTO: Well, I think a big part of it is my wife Kathy. Because there we have four kids and the pace is pretty frenetic. And in the early days of WICT, I would be writing case studies, and we had a 30-foot cord on the phone and we would be doing the curriculum discussions and she would be teaching, I would be supposedly watching the kids.
SCHLEY: Supposedly.
RIZZUTO: But she’s taking care of most of that, so I think that calms you down when you’ve got somebody at your side and watches your back.
SCHLEY: Yeah. And I’m sure you’ve thought about this, but retirement offers a lot of life possibilities. I understand for instance you’re learning Spanish and to swim in your early retirement. But then you also have, what are you going to miss about being active both in the academic and the industry sectors?
RIZZUTO: Well, I think you could miss some teaching, teaching executives, the interface with students. But what I’m hopeful to find is a way to do that. I interface with my colleagues and we do a program in the finance department where we bring people into the — we bring speakers in. And we just did this planning for a speaker on international finance, so the folks who are at Liberty Latin America, they’re going to do that. And so, you can sort of remain relevant there, listen in and see where things are. Chris Noyes, who’s the CFO there, talks about, “We have futures, but we buy weather futures given that we have all this chaos and — “
SCHLEY: Don’t we though. Yeah. But you can’t just turn it off, you want to preserve a sense of purpose and contribution.
RIZZUTO: Exactly. And then things that you’ve worked on, just to see the —
SCHLEY: How they evolved?
RIZZUTO: Right. Because now the City of Loveland they have reached out to, or they’re working with, I don’t even know the name.
SCHLEY: The town?
RIZZUTO: The town.
SCHLEY: Timnath I think.
RIZZUTO: Timnath, right.
SCHLEY: Is that right? Yeah, Timnath.
RIZZUTO: And they’re going to partner with Loveland to have Loveland build plant in their area. Is that economic, or is that a way to go, or is that a waste of money kind of thing?
SCHLEY: And you would be involved in helping to answer those questions or —
RIZZUTO: I would, I’d be curious just to see how they’re doing it. There’s a lot more money that can effectively be used. When it comes to broadband access, it’s a matter of the plant as well as the affordability, and where does the government need to play in order to have universal broadband.
SCHLEY: It’s a really important topic, and one that’s very much alive today because as a country, we have devoted a tremendous amount of funding. But that alone doesn’t solve the equation, right, you still have to have the ability to sustain service. And you talked about affordability. It’s not just availability of broadband, but affordability is a key.
RIZZUTO: Affordability, right.
SCHLEY: But do you see these subsidization and private public partnership programs having consequential impact over time?
RIZZUTO: I think they will. It begins with recognition. The country realizes we need to provide broadband availability and now how to do that and what is government’s role, what is the private sector role. So, I think recognition of the problem is important. Now the question is how to do it.
SCHLEY: Well, nothing happens as fast as we would all like it to happen in life, so some patience is required. But I think there’s this confluence of interest now that’s probably at a peak from what I’ve seen.
RIZZUTO: We talked earlier about Rouzbeh Yassini, who a lot of people —
SCHLEY: Good friend.
RIZZUTO: — call as the father of the cable modem. But he’s working, and he’s been working for several years, on how do we bring broadband to rural areas.
SCHLEY: Underserved areas, yeah.
RIZZUTO: And not just one technology, but we might use a variety of technologies. How do we all get on the same page and make it happen?
SCHLEY: Ron, one subject I did want to address that I neglected to was there’s an organization, or was an organization, perhaps still is called the Magness Institute. Can you talk a little bit about the role that Magness Institute played?
RIZZUTO: The Magness Institute was designed to sort of drive — it was originally designed to be a thought leader part of the Cable Center, and with a chair. And we had a Magness Chair, and it took a while to find a Magness chair, but one of the ones who — and we had a lot of failed attempts.
SCHLEY: It happens.
RIZZUTO: We hired somebody out of the phone industry and he had no idea what to do. We hired Pete Gatseos and Pete was very interested in research, but then found that it was not a good way to do the research. And then sort of it migrated to how about training. And so, we tried the training that we were used to. But then I think the Cable Center now — I wouldn’t know if Diane [Christman] and Camilla [Formica] would tie it back, but I think what they’re doing with the Syndeo Institute with the Intrapreneurship program is really kind of the reality of it, and the customer care program.
SCHLEY: So, its DNA sort of lives on in the form of the new programs.
RIZZUTO: Exactly.
SCHLEY: I’m so heartened at the outset of our conversation when you reaffirmed that I think you use 95 percent of people are pretty good souls on this earth.
RIZZUTO: Exactly.
SCHLEY: Right? And then from there, just kind of talking about and expressing what I see as the Rizzuto impact is out there and will continue to be out there that I think you must be immensely proud of. What haven’t we talked about that’s germane to or important to you?
RIZZUTO: I think we’ve covered most everything. I’m always impressed with the way you weave questions through that really gets to everything.
SCHLEY: Weave is a polite word, a diplomatic word. It could be ricochet, it could be bopped from one place to another.
RIZZUTO: I think the one thing that you had on the list that we hadn’t talked about is what’s happened at DU.
SCHLEY: Sure.
RIZZUTO: And when I started at DU the business school was primarily a teaching organization.
SCHLEY: Seventy-five, right?
RIZZUTO: Seventy-five, right. So, when I got there, the dean — we were just starting, we were known for our teaching, but we weren’t a research school. And so gradually we have over time, now it’s an R1 research institution. You still have the focus on teaching, so we built more balance in terms of that. And then in addition to that, the curriculum, we developed the curriculum with Bill Daniels’ influence in terms of not just teaching courses, but teaching courses where we focus on ethics and professionalism.
SCHLEY: Absolutely. And it’s interesting Ron, when you think about the campus, the names that decorate that campus, Magness, Daniels, Ritchie, tracing to Daniel Ritchie who was the leader of Group W or Westinghouse.
RIZZUTO: Right, Westinghouse.
SCHLEY: And I’m leaving out others. But it really is a testament to the willingness I think of media and telecom people to carry it forward, right?
RIZZUTO: Exactly. And you have Monty Rifkin with the Rifkin Center. And then you have, I’m blanking on his name, the guy who had started United Cable.
SCHLEY: The Schneider Family?
RIZZUTO: Schneider Family because we had the Schneider Board Room.
SCHLEY: That’s right.
RIZZUTO: So a lot of the folks from the industry have supported the Daniels College of Business.
SCHLEY: Right, absolutely. Ron, you’ve mentioned a couple of times, alluded to customer service, customer care, some of the advancements we’ve made, some of the patchy history that this industry has kind of had to struggle with. But there’s a collective called C5 that addresses directly, takes head on this subject of customer care in this industry. Can you explain what C5 is and the role you’ve played in helping to steward it?
RIZZUTO: Again, the C5 was a name, and again I forget what the C5 means, the —
SCHLEY: Let’s presume there are five Cs in there somewhere. [editor’s note: originally it was the Cable Center Customer Care Committee, then the Cable Center Customer Centric Consortium]
RIZZUTO: Yeah, exactly. But it was started by CTAM and they in turn turned to the Cable Center. Tina Waters from Comcast, she used to head it and Jana Henthorn here, they focused and they formed a committee focused on customer care. And so that group would meet with the idea of sharing ideas and issues, so they would meet a couple of times a year. And so, then I got involved with it when the Cable Center recruited Chuck Patti to hold the Cox Chair. So, then Chuck in turn helped turn that into a twice a year event with his wife Maria van Dessel. We would have people from the industry come in twice a year, share information and share ideas. So, it was not the standard conference, but it was more idea sharing. And so, we did that, and again, as you see, these are thought leaders who are watching and helping transform the customer care from a reactionary to a proactive group. And so, there’s a lot of technology and a lot of work that the industry has done so they can be proactive about customer care.
SCHLEY: It reminds me, you talk about the idea sharing element, similar to what you’ve seen happen and helped to make happen with the WICT organization, a willingness in this industry to not hoard your own ideas, right?
RIZZUTO: Exactly. I don’t know the current makeup of the C5 group, but you have Liberty Global, you have Cox, you have Comcast, you have Charter —
SCHLEY: Charter, yeah.
RIZZUTO: — you have Rocco’s [Commisso] —
SCHLEY: Mediacom.
RIZZUTO: — Mediacom. So, you have a lot of middle level companies. But there was originally the bigger players and now there are mid-tier players who are a part of C5 and they come together, share ideas. And again, with it is not — it’s really to get to best practices and then how to develop more of a proactive rather than reactive group.
SCHLEY: I have a general question about that as well because this has been a big part of your professional life. We’re in an age when information is just– we’re awash in it. You can do a chat GPT search on customer care, and it’ll come up with a pretty good list of best practices. But the need for human dialog, for face-to-face sharing, for face-to-face lecturing for instance, is still pretty important, right?
RIZZUTO: Exactly. Because you have the benefit of learning the backstory, “Why did you do this? How did you get to this decision?” And so, the information as well as then the face-to-face sharing I think is very helpful.
SCHLEY: I do too. I just think it’s interesting, something about interaction at a human level still continues to be a pretty powerful force.
RIZZUTO: And again, to the credit of the industry, the industry has always been about sharing ideas and so they’re not hoarding ideas, and so C5 fits with that.
SCHLEY: Excellent description. Thank you. It always struck me that because you have sort of compartmentalized territories, you don’t feel that competitive pressure necessarily in the cable business. If there were two convenience stores, the guy from 7-Eleven, the guy from CVS, I’m not sure they’d get together and share information quite as readily. So, this is the upside of having a sort of capital-intensive natural monopoly kind of business.
RIZZUTO: Yep.
SCHLEY: Well, it’s been a remarkable conversation, and I appreciate the chance to sit down and kind of go over where you’ve been, but also where we’re going in the future and kind of assessing your influence and mark on the whole ecosystem. Thank you for tuning into this iteration of the Hauser Oral History series presented by Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center with the professor. With Ron Rizzuto, I’m Stewart Schley. Thanks for watching.
RIZZUTO: Thank you, Stewart.
