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Dr. Dennis Hill on Why Speed Is Destroying Trust at Work
11 Plays1 month ago
In a world racing toward AI adoption, trust is quietly falling behind.
In this episode of MustardHub Voices: Behind the Build, Curtis Forbes sits down with Dr. Dennis Hill — lifelong educator, technologist, author, and founder of Sagacity — for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, learning, and the human cost of moving too fast. With more than 50 years spent helping organizations navigate change, Dennis brings a rare long-view perspective on technology, work, and society.
They explore why leaders often mistake speed for progress, how unmanaged technological change erodes trust inside organizations, and why lifelong learning is the most important leadership commitment of the future. Dennis also shares thoughtful insights on data ownership, AI as a labor-displacing technology, and why wisdom — not just knowledge — must guide decision-making.
This episode is essential viewing for leaders who want to navigate AI-driven change without losing trust, humanity, or perspective.
About Dennis:
Dr. Dennis Hill—a lifelong builder, teacher, and connector who has spent fifty years helping people make sense of change before the rest of the world even realized it was coming. He grew up in a fatherless working-class family that demanded resilience, a life approach he never abandoned. It shows in how he listens, mentors, and leads.
Dennis is an engineer by training, a technologist by practice, and an objectivist at heart. As the founder of Sagacity and Chair and CEO of IHRIM (pronounced 'eye-rim'), he’s worked across industries and continents—creating strategic partnerships and shaping businesses, educational programs, and emerging workforces—always with a steady hand and a long view. He’s also an international bestselling author and editor, but what people remember most is his calm, grandfatherly way of making even the most advanced ideas feel human and accessible.
At the center of everything he does is a belief he’s carried since his days as an undergrad: that lifelong learning is our greatest force for social progress. It’s not just something Dennis teaches—it’s something he lives, every day.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Mustard Hub Voices' and Dr. Dennis Hill
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome back everyone. This is another installment of Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. In these episodes, I sit down with the people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host, Curtis Forbes, and my guest today is Dennis Hill.
00:00:20
Speaker
ah Dr. Dennis Hill, a lifelong builder, teacher, and connector who spent 50 years helping people make sense of change before the rest of ah the world even realized it was coming.
Dennis Hill's Early Life and Career Foundations
00:00:32
Speaker
He grew up in a fatherless working class family that demanded resilience, a life approach he never abandoned. It shows how he listens, he mentors, and how he leads. Dennis is an engineer by training, a technologist by practice, and an objectivist at heart.
00:00:49
Speaker
As the founder of Sagacity and chair and CEO of IREM, He's worked across industries and continents, creating strategic partnerships and shaping businesses, educational programs, and emerging workforces, always with a steady hand and a long view.
00:01:06
Speaker
He also is an international bestselling author and editor, but what people remember most is his calm, grandfatherly way of making even the most advanced ideas feel human and accessible. And at the center of everything he does is a belief that that he's carried since his days as an undergrad, that lifelong learning is our greatest force for social progress.
00:01:29
Speaker
It's not just something Dennis teaches, it's something he lives every day. Welcome to Behind the Bill. Thank you so much for joining me, Dennis. It's an honor and a privilege for me entirely, Curtis. Thanks for having me.
00:01:41
Speaker
I really loved that. That was like equal parts professional and like absolutely human. very humanizing bio. um And I get the grandfatherly like ah way of of ah of talking and advice and, um you know, just um that that the that that vibe. You know, I've been super excited for today.
00:02:09
Speaker
um And I have so many questions about everything.
Founding of Sagacity and Transitioning from Teaching
00:02:13
Speaker
But before we dive into these things, just to set some context, tell me what is Sagacity and what led you to founder that organization? We'll just start there.
00:02:25
Speaker
Okay, that's a great question. So when I graduated from college initially, um I worked as a research engineer at General Electric Medical Systems, which is today GE Healthcare. care And I was involved in in advanced applications of, at that point in time, new computing technology, which is long been surpassed these days. But back in those days, everything was mainframe and the emerging mini computers came along.
00:02:55
Speaker
And I had gravitated towards those even in my high school. So um pure peer-to-peer work, peer-to-peer counseling, those sorts of things have always been in my, um I guess, arrows in my quiver, working with other people, helping them understand and learn, even as a peer. And um when I went to college, um the same thing was true there. i set up the the mini computer in the biomedical program and had to show the faculty how to use it. So here I am kind of like, you know, the kid on the steps at the temple teaching all the sages, you know, the great mysteries of of religion and history. And I think you get the illusion there, or least I hope you do that that do. That put me in a position of ah working with older people, but doing so respectively, doing so respectfully, and and always towards the idea of learning something new.
00:03:55
Speaker
So When I applied for a part-time teaching job at the School of Engineering, they they made me a much better offer, which was to leave the research world that was in industry.
00:04:07
Speaker
And I was very satisfied with it. was having a good time there. And and we'd done so three projects in a matter of literally ah an early part of a year. Before before i I thought, okay, I'll go teach Pascal. I'll go teach something at the university. And they said, no, we want you, by the way, I'm 23 years old at this point. We want you to head up a new department of computer science engineering, a new bachelor's degree. We want you to kind of just take the,
00:04:32
Speaker
the bull by the horns, because I had been doing not just the work at G, but my work at Marquette, my work within the community in Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin. went In those days, if you knew anything about computers, you knew everything about computers.
00:04:46
Speaker
So everybody would just tackle you for that information and work with you. So I accepted that. and i And I was teaching also at the time at Marquette. So i had to finish out my contract there and my fellowship work. And at the same time, kind of worked part-time at the School of Engineering and moved forward ah with building something from scratch. Again, who builds computer science programs in 1983? I mean, we were the sixth in the nation to be accredited when we went for accreditation in 87. So there was no pioneered pathway to the West Coast that I could follow that would do this. um So basically...
00:05:30
Speaker
I learned within the next couple of years of doing that work how to get things done ah on on a much broader scale, learning how to read balance sheets and income statements and budgets, learning how to put accredited curriculum together and what that might look like, how to work with industry leaders, people who are going to ultimately...
00:05:51
Speaker
hire our graduates and to get their input on what they were looking for in new graduates in this field of computer science engineering. And that just all kind of took place in shape and it required very long hours, which I was in the habit of doing anyhow. And by 1985, I had trustees of the university coming to me and asking me to help provide direct consulting to them. And that's when I formed Sagacity.
00:06:17
Speaker
Here was this Here was this 25, at that point, year old kid in charge of this curriculum. And you know a half a dozen faculty that were old enough to be my grandfathers at the time.
00:06:33
Speaker
But my style was, that whole grandfatherly thing is interesting, my style has always been counselor. But I don't want to call it counselor. you know it's It's really grandfatherly, even at the age of 25.
00:06:46
Speaker
Not to, don't panic is is the whole point. You know, your system's got a blue screen, your mouse isn't working or your DOS disk isn't booting. It's okay. we'll We'll work through this. And sagacity just came to mind. It was, it meant keen judgment.
00:07:02
Speaker
And sometimes that keen judgment is, is based off of real practical experience. And that practical experience I had been getting at least in the computer field yeah since I was 14.
00:07:15
Speaker
and and have And had good role models for the grandfatherly vibe. Constantly. I mean, i was fatherless. My mom, my I'll just say this because I'll i'll open my kimono to your audience. this is you if if If the post-Generation Jones people want anything, and more so now with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they want authenticity. So let me just tell you, I grew up in a fatherless home where marriage was not a virtue.
00:07:44
Speaker
o my, my mother had been married before she married my father, um and had my older sister who teaches these days, but was a consultant and, and an advisor and some major fortune, uh, 500 companies for most of her life. She now teaches at Villanova and, Columbia and has taught at Rutgers in her retirement years, but she's like me. We just, we're retired, but not expired. We, we find things to do with our time, but the, um,
00:08:15
Speaker
And coming up in that industry, you do, um I mean, comes coming up in a family like that, you do look to gravitate towards role models. yeah And the earliest role model in my life was my Uncle Jim.
00:08:30
Speaker
And I'll just mention Uncle Jim McHugh, who held three jobs. I never knew him ever didn't work anything less than three jobs. He was a supervisor at the Arco Refinery in South Philadelphia. He'd leave that job at the end of the day and go sell cars at a dealership and in Delaware County.
00:08:50
Speaker
And then he'd get home about nine or 10 o'clock at night. And he helped his children kind of start their own businesses, including one in real estate and another one in janitorial services. And so this, this, this man was the the epitome of workaholism and I liked it.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah. You know, what do I need to find things to do in my life besides scouting with which my mom pushed me through swimming, skating, athletics and, and things like that to round things out. Um,
00:09:22
Speaker
and to not suffer, I think, the neglect or the atrophy that i that latchkey kids were kind of assaulted with back in those days. you If you were a latchkey kid, you just didn't fit in.
00:09:34
Speaker
So I found that the best way to fit in is just fit in. Yeah. go Well, and and through work where you can really develop a sense of purpose. So I can certainly see how, you know, that, that could be incredibly helpful in those circumstances. um What, to tell me about IRM.
00:09:51
Speaker
Who is it for and how did you get involved there?
Involvement with IREM and HRIS Roles
00:09:56
Speaker
So again, in, in all candor up until I was invited to join their board, I didn't even know who they were.
00:10:04
Speaker
i know who i I knew who SHRM was. um i sort of knew who HRCI was. i understood what the other associations globally were, but um but i I didn't know who IRM was.
00:10:19
Speaker
And i was nominated by somebody on the board. To this day, I don't even know who it was because I've never gotten them to ah to take the the blame or the credit for this. But I was asked to join their board.
00:10:31
Speaker
went through an interview with some very longstanding founders and officers. And they said, we we don't care if you don't know who we are. This is what we stand for. And what do they stand for?
00:10:44
Speaker
They stand for the people in the gap between HR and IT. Those people that are responsible for systems and processes, basically of employee data.
00:10:57
Speaker
And apart from a private corporation's financial statements, because public publicly traded companies have to disclose all of this, but private corporations' financial statements are truly private, or or your own personal income tax is truly private, the the most sensitive information in an organization is the ah HR information. It's people's salaries. It's people's performance information. it's people's, all this personally identifying information. And that appealed to me because my area of research for decades has been computer security um and and data ownership.
00:11:32
Speaker
um from from back when I was a prof all the way to even in recent years when I'm talking about storing information on blockchains and things like that. so I said, well, you're in an industry, you're in a sector that I'm very interested in, which is the application of HR and and IT t principles. But what I thought was really unique was that they weren't just talking about it. These were practitioners who were immersed in it. And it's not like you can go into even a large enterprise and find more than one HRIS specialist today, even today.
00:12:07
Speaker
they're kind of a peculiar people. They're HR because they're people persons and then they're IT, which means they're things persons. They're the kind of person who will spend hours after their kids go to bed playing around with the latest tool or the latest ai application that's come out these days, whatever it is. And they will consume hours just to develop that knowledge and understanding. They are a community of people who by their very nature like to stay at the leading edge of knowledge.
00:12:37
Speaker
and And that, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, I, I, it just, I love, I love that. And I love how you describe it And I'm kind of curious, is this sort of the point um where people,
00:12:49
Speaker
where people became the central focus of your work, not the systems and technology? Like, was it really when you when you moved into this organization? um No. ah my my My relationship with systems goes back to when I was still a professor and um working on integrated applications. In fact, we developed my team ah under my leadership as a professor. and Then I left the college to go join the group of companies that developed the software.
00:13:19
Speaker
was a completely integrated accounting and manufacturing system on Oracle running on Sun servers. Very advanced state-of-the-art concept in the 1980s and early 90s. And ah today, of course, that that's been the standard of yeah ERP. ah you You buy an integrated solution on a database and you do that.
00:13:37
Speaker
um we had our we we We had the first contact management system 10 years before Salesforce was even incorporated. and And my approach to contact management was much broader than customer management. It was all human contacts. This goes back to the 1980s. If I'm dealing with a prospect in sales, I track that. right Back then, I took a lot on the chin for violating Orwellian principles. right This is all Big Brother stuff. You're tracking all this information like emails and and and their orders and all of this. And I'm like, oh, this is where the future is. And um and then I extended that to vendor performance as well as workforce relationship. call it workforce relationship management and because we wanted to know where people are coming from, put their resumes in the system, look at skill sets. This is all in the late nineteen eighty s And then we went ahead and ah produced that as a package when i I had been promoted to vice president at the college and raised money for a few years as an institutional development officer, vice president of business and common affairs. And then when the president announced his retirement, that's when I left and joined um joined up with the Nordic Group, whose board I had served on for at least five or six years prior to that. And we took the package commercial along with our hardware division, Articons. And that company became public as Dott Hill in 1997.
00:15:06
Speaker
And that's when I sold my stock and left. I see, okay. Yeah, so you were definitely focused heavily on people even well before you joined that, well, and maybe that was part of the impetus behind them
Growth of the Nordic Group and Organizational Challenges
00:15:20
Speaker
going going after you and really wanting wanting you to be part of that organization, I can imagine.
00:15:25
Speaker
Well, and bringing a small business attitude to this. Now, now the Nordic Group was privately controlled. And ah they they published their sales at about, I see we took them from about 120 million as a group of 14 companies to a half a billion before we stopped reporting sales because it was a private private company.
00:15:42
Speaker
But that's where we were. And that was all due to the fact that we were able to get 14 diverse companies. I mean, one making golf carts, another one making yo-yos. I love talking about that, right?
00:15:54
Speaker
here you Your customers will get this, right? I like writing about it, and I actually have these things. That, everybody as a kid, at least in my generation, yeah maybe maybe the next gen of the X had dunking yo-yos. I had one of those.
00:16:09
Speaker
This was the, and this is a butterfly. This is the really weird one that you do a lot of tricks with, and don't don't ask me to do it at this point, but I could at one point walk the dog and do the butterfly and all that stuff.
00:16:20
Speaker
You know what? There's a lot of engineering and science that goes into this. Just to save a penny, and I write about this in one of my books, just to save a penny on this production, we would have meetings on an annual basis. Because if you're producing 5,000 of these an hour in multiple cells in two different locations, one in the United States and one in in Mexico, that drops to six figures annually just for one manufacturing center making yo-yos.
00:16:50
Speaker
and And I call it the penny yo-yo model. this This process of integrating and and putting systems together was a very new concept back then. And even today, i wrote something on LinkedIn just a few months ago that said that the people in charge of HRIS need to sit at the same table as the the operating people in charge of the CRM and in charge of the ERP systems and come together on understanding how information is integrated corporate wide, because that that employee that has ah you know some insights, maybe they're a designer or a manufacturer, may leave your company someday. And they're either going to be a strategic, they could be a strategic partner, or they could be a customer.
00:17:34
Speaker
So how you relate to people in your business isn't isn't an afterthought, and it shouldn't be something sidelined. It really is something as integral as defining what it is the product or services you're going to sell.
00:17:49
Speaker
You know, you you talked about, you know, an erosion of trust, you know, in some conversations that we've had prior, you know, but between employees and leadership and and between people and technology. Yeah.
00:18:10
Speaker
what What breaks trust the fastest inside an organization? Oh, i I think that's a really, really great question.
00:18:21
Speaker
um People will always let people down. They just do. it's It's the nature of being human. um People also impose unreasonable expectations on other people.
00:18:35
Speaker
So expectations are are our leading cause of of disappointment. um And I think that that's what ultimately fuels distrust because you're we're right now we're looking at Tectonic change in industry, in governance around the world because of AI.
00:18:56
Speaker
um And whether you're in a small community opposing a data center or you're an employee in an organization hearing that your job is going to be out, well, replaced with automation.
00:19:08
Speaker
um You're concerned about your future. And we look to political leadership to help us navigate that as a country. And having been in other countries, um they don't have the populations like we have in the United States and in our in our sphere to be concerned about with our trading partners to get there.
00:19:28
Speaker
So I ultimately think, and I've just put this in ah in a couple of quotes to social media colleagues the last week or so, that the mistake we're making that's eroding this trust is the fact that we mistake speed for progress.
00:19:49
Speaker
We're so quick to adopt things because the the generations since Joan's generation ah has been one seeking immediate gratification and response, whether it's on a phone or it's on a tablet or it's in your headsets or whatever.
00:20:06
Speaker
um You want immediate notification, immediate gratification ah or satisfaction. And if you've got a problem to deal with, you want an immediate resolution. yeah and And the problem is human beings don't function like that.
00:20:18
Speaker
people People need time um to process. And the friend of truth is time. i'm quoting I'm quoting a great philosopher. Don't ask me who. I just use it all the time. I stole it But it's absolutely a fact that the friend of truth is time. And when you don't allow time to purge and process and really allow things to settle, um you get a lot of mistruths.
00:20:51
Speaker
And the mistruths um become points of distrust in organizations. So, and in and in families. I mean, I can talk about this multidimensionally. It's a spiritual issue too for people. You want you want to know that what you're hearing is fact.
00:21:13
Speaker
But you don't want it to sound critical. you know' want and And again, it's human nature not to to work very hard. So don't make more work for me in in my having to process this truth.
00:21:25
Speaker
And that's where we need more time. We really need to stop the engines of technology adoption. I'm not saying freeze them. I'm not saying anything like that. ah I'm just saying you need to allow time for people to digest what what they're being fed and let them decide for themselves you know what they want to do.
Consulting Philosophy and Embracing Lifelong Learning
00:21:45
Speaker
And um that management process, given the fact that a company has two personalities, that the the solution, the product, the service side, and the human side that brings all that together, you can't just say, oh, the workforce, we'll just put another warm body in. Those days are gone.
00:22:04
Speaker
You know, the gig economy is changing all of that way of thinking. You're looking for match skill sets. You're looking for somebody to come in and solve the problem and solve the problem. Don't just treat the symptom. Don't create an eternal job for yourself. And that that's probably one of my guiding principles as a consultant I have found immensely valuable for almost 50 years is that I come into a place and I tell them I'm here to put myself out of work.
00:22:30
Speaker
I wanna solve your problem move on. The funny thing is, i don't lose clients. they've I've had them so long that they've started to die, right? and And what that means is that that you have to have the right attitude, that you have that skill set, that you have that insight, that you have that commitment to lifelong learning that we talked about, that these kinds of changes, these tectonic changes we see coming, just require a broader awareness, maybe some upskilling, a little bit of training. But all in all, that sense of resilience that we talked about, no matter what beats you down, what puts you down, what slows you down, you're going to come back with a much more forward thinking, positive attitude um to overcome that.
00:23:14
Speaker
It um it's interesting how you diagnose this, um this idea of sort of mistaking speed for progress. And it, it,
00:23:26
Speaker
For me, I feel like that kind of opens up a a million questions, right? Like, you know, where are the leaders leaders confusing, you know, the two, the activity with the alignment? How do you know when organizations are moving too fast for trust to keep up? What are these?
00:23:47
Speaker
And i guess by extension, what are then the consequences that you see happen most often? Well, you know, measuring toxicity is not an index in business by HR standards yet.
00:24:01
Speaker
yet Lots of books written on the toxic employee, the toxic manager. um and And what's interesting is a lot of people, you know, have, they have different attitudes depending on whether or not they're gravitated towards the enterprise side, large kind of corporation culture or the SMB side, which actually employs more people than all of the,
00:24:24
Speaker
The enterprise companies do. So if you're going to deal with workforce, you can't ignore the SMBs. And if you're going to deal with workforce, you can't deal with just everybody being technically fluent or technically immersed, especially if you're dealing with supply chain partners in other countries.
00:24:40
Speaker
um yeah I'll give you an example. We want people to adopt as as as ah as an industry association. We want people to adopt best practices, best practices.
00:24:52
Speaker
What are best practices in business and HR if not dependent on the unique culture of that company? So what is the best practice in company A may not be a best practice at all that's acceptable in company B. I'm not talking about basic transaction processing. Like here's here are the questions you ask on an application and here's how we process this through our talent acquisition system. I'm talking about how you handle grievances. you reconciliation? How do you handle reconciliation?
00:25:21
Speaker
How do you handle training when when half of senior management isn't even committed to training in its workforce? they're They're slow to respond or they say, oh, you'll learn it on your own. it's's It's an informal process. Those sorts of things become an issue. So what are the best practices today, especially when the when the planet keeps shifting underneath us? First, it was pandemic. Now it's the mainstreaming AI and all of the things we expect to see coming out ah from these evolutionary steps that are grand in the in the HR space.
00:25:54
Speaker
So we see people quitting, we see people giving up, we see ah because of AI displacing a lot of easily codified entry level jobs, people coming out of college with with degrees that are really not employable.
00:26:10
Speaker
um computer Computer, I have to tell you this, When you combine computer engineering unemployment and computer science unemployment, the two of them amount to little over 13% of the unemployment in this country.
00:26:23
Speaker
It's number one. The number one field of unemployment. Number two is art history. art Did you say art history? Yeah. And they're like at 9%. So, you know, when you look at these things and you say, wait a minute, we're technology driven. And that's U.S. That's not worldwide. That's just U.S. Okay.
00:26:43
Speaker
Where do we go with people who are being educated in fields that they really aren't going to have jobs in? Or worse yet, this is what a lot of HR, learning, and development departments are dealing with right now.
00:26:54
Speaker
Well, we need to be on the AI bandwagon. Well, who was in the accounting department 40 years ago that said, hey, everybody needs to know spreadsheets tomorrow? Nobody.
00:27:06
Speaker
It needed time to be absorbed and people needed to know they could use spreadsheets to to put engineering data, manufacturing data, HR data, all sorts of other things in there besides a ledger for accounting. It just takes time to digest that. And that's the Wild West we're in right now.
00:27:23
Speaker
it's It's completely unguided, lawless, unethical. um And by that, I mean that these these boundaries have not been defined. yeah And fundamentally, I'll tell you, the problem goes back to the very beginning of the information age.
Technological Advances and Legal Challenges
00:27:40
Speaker
And it's specifically in the United States, a lack of law or a constitutional right to you owning your own data.
00:27:54
Speaker
Hmm. Tell me more about this. I have more questions about learning, being a driver of of some economic progress because you just started touching on this. But this sounds like a very fascinating tangent that I really want to go down right now.
00:28:10
Speaker
I'll keep it quick. um I'll keep it very quick. We have technology today that allows every human being on this planet to have their own digital distributant ledger or blockchain.
00:28:23
Speaker
I wouldn't you know, the current generation are Merkle companies. um DAGs or dynamic acyclical graphs, which are like web chains as opposed to blockchain. So I'll use that term. Much faster, 10,000 transactions per second, whereas blockchains take sometimes seconds to actually manage. So we have an infrastructure now that says, Curtis, your degrees, your certifications, your driver's license, your medical information, your financial transactions at the bank, your purchases on on Amazon and Target.com and places like that. don't have to be stored on dozens or hundreds of other systems out there. All those transactions can be posted to your blockchain.
00:29:07
Speaker
You own it. It's yours. That's your digital DNA. Everywhere you have have treaded on the Internet through a web browser is there forever. But it doesn't. That's only because they've never put a corral around that.
00:29:20
Speaker
They have never said that it's your data. They've led you to believe that all that personally identifying information that you've provided it in order to get, it doesn't matter, free access to Gmail or a Prime account with Amazon is not yours.
00:29:37
Speaker
But it is yours. let me Let me ask you a question about this. yeah and and you know, maybe I understand, maybe I don't, but it it begs the question, all right, so the transaction on Amazon or the driver's license or some of these things,
00:29:54
Speaker
Who's to say that you own that transaction and not, you know, the government, the process, the license or target who actually, you know, provided the goods and services? Why does it have to live on the personal blockchain and not where these organizations who provided the product, service, whatever it happened to be to the individual?
00:30:15
Speaker
Great question. Because all those monolithic systems that are running out there, whether they're physically running on ah on a mainframe or supercomputer, or they're part of a distributed network on Amazon Web Services or something else, really comes down to gathering that information. Once they've got your name, your address, your financial records, or at least some aspect of that, and they they assign you an account number, and they assign you a credit limit.
00:30:39
Speaker
Assign an account number. Apart from anything else, yeah, I mean, ah you know what I'm saying, apart from that, there's There's no other real reason for them to have your social security number, your bank account number, all your other credit cards, any of that stuff. They just need to make their decision and establish your unique account with them. And where am I going to ship the stuff?
00:30:57
Speaker
Which is public information anyhow. I mean, I can find out anybody's address. Now, I'm talking about meaningful data. I'll give you a very current topic at hand. okay Australia, this is like last week's news, right?
00:31:11
Speaker
Australia just implemented a ban on people under the age of 16 having access to social media. Right. How is that even conceptually enforceable?
00:31:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. And one of the first thoughts that went through my mind when I saw that, like, you know, ah the the the theoretical, um you know, positives are certainly outweighed by the logistical negatives.
00:31:40
Speaker
So again, I'm going to go back being an old man. I'm able to say some things. 40 years ago, I actually coined the term at a credit card fraud investigators conference that the law lags technology.
00:31:54
Speaker
Always has. It has since the hackers of the 1980s and it does today when we're talking about something like this. We need a law, and I kind of alluded to this before, that says you own your data.
00:32:07
Speaker
So if you have your own personal blockchain and your birth certificate, which is a government document, is residing on your blockchain, Now all that service provider has to do, whether it's TikTok or YouTube or Reddit or whatever, establishing your account just needs the read access to your birth certificate, which is fully immutable and verified by the government on your blockchain to read that just to validate your age.
00:32:34
Speaker
And you're done. I know your age. And of course, because it's your blockchain, you would have to give rights for that very limited access to read it.
00:32:45
Speaker
In the case of medical records, which is HIPAA laws in the United States, um think about what we used to have to go through. It's becoming less and less now, but i i'm I'm very familiar with the with the investigation going on with Epic Systems, which has really grown immensely into the market as a dominating force.
00:33:02
Speaker
Based here in Wisconsin, 10,000 employees, not consultants, not one 1099 among them, all them employees. and And they're being investigated because of um ah data integrity issues, data of security issues. Well, what if you didn't have that there? What if um my medical records and and they they're on this hospital network and they're over on that hospital network weren't on those networks at all, but on my blockchain and I end up going into an emergency room in a third hospital network that I don't have access to, boom.
00:33:37
Speaker
And I give them access to my medical records immediately. No signing of HIPAA forms, no faxing of records, no email transfers, none of this stuff. You're coming after me for my medical records. I just have to authorize you to read that. And I'm going to enable you to write to your subset on my blockchain of medical records you create for me.
00:33:59
Speaker
So now all my lab results and everything is in one place. This is when we when I started conceiving this stuff with my teams back 30 or 40 years ago, we didn't have the technology to do this. to- Today, not only we have the technology to do this, it's proven technology.
00:34:14
Speaker
no This is stuff all the vendors have to do. is implemented. And part of the challenge there is that, especially in the ah HR space, I could go into ERP and CR, but let me just talk about the HR space.
00:34:28
Speaker
It's an extremely fragmented market. I won't mention the, I mean, the the the the number one vendor is considered to be Workday, and yet they don't even have 10% of the market.
00:34:40
Speaker
No, and it's also comprised of God only knows how many transactional systems stitched together by paperclips and chewing gum.
00:34:50
Speaker
16. average in a company of enterprise size, 16 different systems hit HR in some way. it It's is an interesting concept here about owning that. that person I can see how you know you've brought up some really clear examples of how that would be really effective in healthcare. i can see how that would be incredibly helpful in ah HR as well. you know Even tying it back to what we were, but you know before we sort of went down that direction, but learning and development, right? Because anything that you're doing, I guess, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, you know but but going down the same path,
00:35:28
Speaker
theoretically, right, ah all of the things that you're doing, either within an organization, or any kind of learning that you're doing outside of the organization can all still live here in some way, right? To sort of give you this factual irrefutable evidence of the expertise that you may have based on all of the things that you have done, right? yeah that That learning and and development, um you know, a is is that does that make sense?
00:35:56
Speaker
Absolutely. and And as we come to the realization ah that the education industrial complex Not that I'm criticizing my initial employers back in the day, but the university systems. um When I went to college, I had one loan. It was $2,500, and it was a 2% loan to be paid off over 10 years through the state of Pennsylvania, even though I went to school in Wisconsin. well Today, it's all private lending. Most of private lending. It's guaranteed, but it takes the student out of the picture.
00:36:27
Speaker
You know, if it's like any other financial transaction today. They sign off on the obligation and then it's up to them to pay it off. And the only people making money is the university because they get they're going to get the money because you signed off on it anyhow. So they can continue in their status quo approach to education, which is you know making bigger buildings and and expanding campuses. um and And the financial institutions that are now charging...
00:36:53
Speaker
what I consider to be really punitive interest rates for for the price of education. I mean, I am a conservative. I want to put that out there. I am a fiscal conservative, but I think that public education through twelfth grade should be free.
00:37:08
Speaker
And I think that college education should be affordable. and um And I think that that certification and many certs that are coming along now um are actually what companies are looking for. do do you have the skill or don't you? Are you proficient or not?
Critique of the Education System
00:37:25
Speaker
I mean, high school diplomas today. do not define proficiency anymore. No, even a lot of times, even in colleges, don't even either, because think about how many people, like realistically, how many people actually go into the field that they studied in in in college. I would argue not as many as you would imagine.
00:37:44
Speaker
No. And how many baristas and casino jack black blackjack dealers do we have master's degrees from? you know i i think think so So why do you think organizations still under-invest in developing the people that they already have?
00:37:59
Speaker
Let's talk about the that. I think they've gotten used to the old model, ah you know the old Adam Smith model that I have a production line and I have a specific tactile skill that I need. And we have argued now for decades that about the need for people to be critical and creative thinkers.
00:38:17
Speaker
Yet, apart from defining that, I mean, many of the people who are supposedly teaching classes, uh, we would hope are critical and creative thinkers. That's what professors used to be.
00:38:29
Speaker
um but as the industrial complex has metastasized, we now see a lot of remedial teaching being done in colleges that kids should have already had by the time they graduated high school.
00:38:41
Speaker
And, um, We've eliminated high school dropoutism to almost down down to less than a percent from 1950 something when it was about 25 percent.
00:38:53
Speaker
OK, we've almost eliminated that. But you know what's happened proportionally along the same time is that we've also... graduated less proficient kids. They're more and more illiterate, more and more innumerate. they they they the eighty I think the stat I just saw was 74% of adults don't have a concept of performance by statistic. In other words, if they say there's an 80% chance of snow, they really don't understand what that means.
00:39:20
Speaker
And that's strange. yeah that That means we're graduating, I think, and I'm going to say it probably in an a politically incorrect manner, We're graduating more, but dumber people.
00:39:32
Speaker
So what do companies need to do? They need to address this deficiency, not by going back to the school districts that they're already paying taxes on and the people's income taxes are paid for it, property taxes are paid for And they can't go back to the universities because they only work nine months a year. And I know I'm going to get some crap on that, but let's face it. I mean, the three reasons why people go into education is June, July, and August. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
00:39:55
Speaker
I went into engineering because of English, geography, and history. I didn't have to take any of it. And yet today, i look back on my life, Curtis, and I say, what are the three things that made a difference in my life?
00:40:08
Speaker
It's a command of a vocabulary and knowing how to craft the word. It's understanding other people in light of their history and understanding the makeup of a geopolitical system around geography.
00:40:20
Speaker
And until you recognize that we have to get back to the fundamentals of education and educating people and giving them those basic tools, we're going to continue to do this remedial repair work. And unfortunately, getting to the point of your question, businesses and some are doing this.
00:40:35
Speaker
You know, I'm not again, I'm not going I'm not lifting anybody up on a on a on a dais here. But Musk is doing this in his own homegrown area down in Austin. you know, he's invested in K through 12. He wants to put in a university because he sees STEM as the fundamental component of that educational network. That's just not even trickling through the rest of the country.
00:40:58
Speaker
And so half the country today, whether they're on Social Security or they're on some sort of disability income or some other issue, half the country, for the most part, does not work.
00:41:10
Speaker
They're receiving some sort of income from 70-some different programs in the federal and state governments in order to cut out ah a subsistence that lets them breathe.
00:41:22
Speaker
But they're not living. And America being the richest country in the world, literally, with the with the greatest amount of resources, regardless of what we're saying about Canada and Greenland and Ukraine and and Russia and all of these different things that are out there, America today is still the richest country in the world.
00:41:40
Speaker
and And by that, I'm talking about the amount of metals that we're sitting on, the amount of petroleum that we're sitting on, the amount of land that the federal government owns. We are the richest people in the world. We should have no homelessness in this country. I just got back from Egypt. The government builds high rises there. There is no homeless on the streets, none.
00:42:00
Speaker
And yet the per capita income in Egypt is $3,000 year. And here we are per capita income in the United States at $80,000 a year.
00:42:13
Speaker
And we have homelessness still in single percentages in many cities. It's unacceptable. and And an educational system that that is at best atrophied at best.
00:42:25
Speaker
I'm not even going to complain about it. just going to say it it it we supposedly have 300,000 unemployed teachers in this country. I don't know where they're at. But ah I know the educational systems aren't working and they're feeding that into the universities, which is why the universities are playing into this and graduating kids that can't get jobs.
00:42:44
Speaker
um and And now AI is there. AI is that great wall. that is now going to cause everybody to stare at and say, how are we really going to handle all of these people that we've had working for us or all these people that we've had on some of these government programs and still give them a meaningful life in the so-called greatest country and greatest ah economic base in the world?
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting. I want to respond to some of it. You covered quite a ah bit of ground there. i'm not I'm not sure I'll be able to get to all of it, but I do want to say... You know, I think that the it in education, it's gotten to the point where where the goal is to graduate people, not teach them.
00:43:27
Speaker
And that is there's obviously a systemic issue there, I think, more than more than anything else. um So, i you know, I would agree, you know, wholeheartedly with um with sort of that.
00:43:39
Speaker
I don't know that I would call it a diagnosis, right? I'm not sure that I know what what the... And maybe, right, it's... it's and I'm out of my depth, right, when we talk about, you know, what what those inherent problems are causing those things, but I definitely see that. But the correction you already have, you've already educated yourself, you've committed yourself to lifelong learning until someday when you say, I'm just not going to learn anymore. when it When it comes to AI, you know, it's interesting, I think, that... um You know, two of the biggest influencers to success, I think, for, you know, the majority of of life on Earth up until now has been knowledge and capital.
00:44:22
Speaker
And ai presents infinite knowledge at zero cost. So you have this emerging level playing field, right, for those who know how to, you know, harness that power, right? it's It's exceptional in so many ways, right? its it it It has become the great equalizer.
00:44:48
Speaker
um you know, in in in so many different ways, right? i mean, and and it begs the question on its role within business, but not even, I mean, every facet of the business, its role in finance, its role in operations, its role in HR, its war its role in how leaders make decisions, right?
00:45:14
Speaker
it's it um It helps in so many places. It makes things better. And then it gets in the way in some places. How do we know where it gets in the way? How do we know where it makes things worse, right? What matters for leaders? What do they need to be paying attention to now when it comes to these, you know, when when it comes to this this great equalizer?
00:45:39
Speaker
that rhetorical? but I, you know, well, I guess maybe nobody has the we all have our opinions. that's all it is and And I, if you look at my posts on social media, I usually say it's just my opinion, but, and then I usually go on because that's my qualifier. It's just my opinion, but this is what I think.
00:45:59
Speaker
Um, So AI is the first technology invented by humankind that has, as you already mentioned, really instant scalability, right, at at ah virtually no cost.
00:46:14
Speaker
um But the other thing is it is the first technology that's that intentionally displaces work work or labor capacity. By intention, that's the idea, that we have this intelligence in here that can handle our transactions and do it much faster, much more accurately than what we could if we were human beings. And so by definition, AI is a labor capacity displacement technology that we never had to deal with before.
00:46:41
Speaker
Everything else from the cotton gin to the computer was all ah adding labor capacity because we needed people to to interact with it. What we're lacking today in the AI space, and I don't think federal or state level has really grappled with this. And again, I'm going to go back to the the data ownership and security level. You've got to get the first button right.
00:47:05
Speaker
or SNAP. You've got to get that right to get the rest of it right. And until you realize that the data that it's processing is data that affects pretty much a lot of human beings.
00:47:16
Speaker
And we we still don't we still don't license computer engineers in this country who develop products that impact human beings like we do architects.
00:47:26
Speaker
or electrical engineers, or mechanical engineers, or civil engineers, who have to be licensed in order to create roads and buildings and things like that. We don't do that in the computer field. And we haven't in 40 years of the PC.
00:47:40
Speaker
So what do you do? You need to have some way of allowing people to recognize wisdom is necessary. And wisdom comes with experience, not just knowledge.
00:47:51
Speaker
it It comes with scraping your knees. And unfortunately, ai won't just allow us to scrape a knee at a time in a way that we can just put a bandaid on it. It's going to scrape our bodies. It's, it's, it's going to do things at a times, uh, reflective of, of a 10, a hundred, a thousand times of damage when it does do damage. And and it will do damage. I mean, AI today hallucinates.
00:48:19
Speaker
Yeah. AI will will understand what answers you're looking for and literally lie to you and give you an answer that you want. And it will cite references that don't exist. And it will do all of those things.
00:48:32
Speaker
First experiment I did for the magazine was take an article that I created. And I don't mind giving a little cheat out there. People want to know why I write so prolifically. It has nothing do with AI. I've always written a lot of good, prolific articles. When I went to law school, I was the kid that had the 30 or 40 references kid, 58 years old. I was a student that had the 30 to 40 references on each of his articles when the other students were doing six and seven, and they thought that was a lot.
00:48:58
Speaker
I go back after I've stayed at what I know, and I have wisdom and experience, and I do a lot of reading to keep keep up on stuff. And I say, OK, now give me some citations to support my facts.
00:49:09
Speaker
Yeah. And and it came back with, I don't know, 12, 15 different citations. It didn't even exist. I love um I love what you what you mentioned when you talk about, you know, wisdom and experience. I often i often tell my older kids, you know, that that good decisions come from experience and experience comes from bad decisions.
00:49:31
Speaker
Um, you know, as a way to at least help them understand that we all go through this. We've all been there. We all get the scrape on the knee, right? That's what gives you the experience. So, you know, don't do whatever you did the next time. Make the better decision. Right.
00:49:49
Speaker
Um, you know, I, i i I always like to kind of wrap up with a a thought, you know, um we've covered so much ground, so you're gonna you're going to wind up having to shove a whole lot into a small amount here, Dennis. But if you could give leaders...
00:50:10
Speaker
you know, today, if you could leave them with one piece of advice about, yeah about leading people through change, you know, this kind of change that we're talking about, this, which would feel so existential, right?
00:50:23
Speaker
The change that we're facing, the change that we're inviting into our businesses, the change that we're facing as even as employees, right? Because as leaders, we're we're still, you know, ah ah often a servant and a fiduciary of the organization that we're stewarding.
00:50:38
Speaker
yeah Um, And you only have a ah moment, right? They ask you for one thing, you're on an elevator to the top floor and before the doors open and they walk right out of there. What is that one thing that you leave them with?
00:50:49
Speaker
it it It comes down to that idea of lifelong learning. The people sitting in the C-suite did not get there because of what what what we used to traditionally call the Peter principle, right? Just promote, promote, promote until they're promoted to their highest level of incompetency.
C-Suite's Role in Lifelong Learning Culture
00:51:05
Speaker
that that Those days are long gone and they've been gone since I think the internet really came into being and the web really took shape in the late 90s.
00:51:13
Speaker
um But there's a lot of value in that interpersonalization of the C-suite to the people that they oversee, the people that they're responsible for. So stewardship is a great word.
00:51:26
Speaker
um it but Not at the expense of profit. Companies, again, I'm going to go back to conservatism. Companies exist to make a profit for the stockholders. um People who want to deny that and fight that, there there's this I think they have sociopathic tendencies because you're not going to change hundreds of years of industrial development and and business because you think there's some sort of moral obligation a company has to have.
00:51:51
Speaker
you know companies do not have consciences, but they have people. And so the C-suite should be occupied by people who recognize the value of their own experience and really want to impart that to the people who work for them.
00:52:08
Speaker
And that's where life that commitment to lifelong learning begins. It begins in the role models we select. It begins in the the things that we emulate and that have made us successful um and allowing people to skin their knees, if that's the case.
00:52:22
Speaker
And that takes money. It takes resources. And ultimately, it takes that commitment from the C-suite to share in that commitment that we each should have to lifelong learning. And that will get us through the century.
00:52:35
Speaker
Lifelong learning, leadership, ah role models, which kind of ties it back to, you know, the very beginning of our chat. which was a very well done, Mr. or Dr. Dennis Hill there.
00:52:49
Speaker
um I really appreciate you taking the time to join me today, Dennis. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity, Curtis. And of course, these are the holidays. I'm partying already in my party shirt. So happy holidays and and happy 2026.
00:53:06
Speaker
twenty twenty six It's going to be a year great change. It's going to be quite quite the year ahead. And of course, thanks to all you for joining us. This is Mustard Hub Voices behind the build. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. And I also recommend visiting mustardhub.com. You can learn more about Mustard Hub, get started for free while you're there and discover how we help companies become destinations for workplace happiness and turn culture into a competitive edge. Until next time.