Insights
The short version: we kept solving the same problems inside that we could solve outside.
We're married. We should probably get that out of the way first since it's the question everyone asks. Yes, we work together. No, it's not weird. Or maybe it is and we've just been doing it long enough that we can't tell anymore.
Between the two of us, we've spent about thirty years inside one of the world's largest medical technology companies. Dave built the learning infrastructure — enterprise platforms, leadership development programs, the technology layer underneath all of it. Hillary ran the operations side — integrated business planning, demand management, supply chain analytics. Different org charts, different buildings sometimes, but we kept bumping into the same problems from different angles.
The leadership program that looked great on paper but didn't change anything on the floor. The planning process that generated beautiful decks but fell apart the first week of execution. The technology deployment that solved a problem nobody actually had while the real problem sat in somebody's inbox getting ignored.
Here's what we noticed, sitting across from each other at the dinner table after long days on different sides of the same company: the organizations that struggled weren't short on talent or budget or ambition. They were short on integration. The people strategy lived in HR. The operational strategy lived in supply chain. The technology strategy lived in IT. And nobody — nobody — was designing the connections between them.
Dave would build a leadership program and it would stall because the operational processes it was supposed to support hadn't changed. Hillary would redesign a planning process and it would stall because the people hadn't been developed to run it. Both of us kept deploying technology that worked perfectly in the demo and then sat unused because nobody redesigned the work around it.
At some point — honestly, over a glass of wine in Leland — we looked at each other and said: this gap isn't unique to our company. It's everywhere. And we might be the only two people annoying enough to want to fix it from both sides simultaneously.
Two reasons. First, AI is rewriting the rules for how organizations operate, and most companies are deploying it without rethinking the human systems around it. That's a problem we're built to solve because we've lived on both sides — the technology and the people. We're not theoretical about this. We've been in the weeds.
Second, we've accumulated enough scar tissue to be useful. We know what doesn't work because we've tried it. We know what does work because we've done it, at scale, across geographies, in high-stakes environments where getting it wrong costs real money. We'd rather spend the next chapter helping organizations get it right the first time.
Leland Blue stones are slag from old iron smelting furnaces on the Lake Michigan shore near our place in Leelanau County. Industrial byproduct that tumbled in the water for over a century until it became something people collect and treasure. Industrial origins, refined by time and environment. We liked that.
We're not building a big firm. We're building a focused one. Two principals. No associates getting trained on your dime. When you hire us, you get us. If that sounds like what you need, we should talk.
← Back to Insights