GeoHero-Steve Wendland
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[00:00:00] Guy: welcome back Geo Hero listeners. Really excited for another episode today with Steve Winland. Welcome, Steve. Wanna introduce yourself.

[00:00:09] Steve: Sure. Great to be here. Thanks guy. I'm Steve Wendling. I'm a geotechnical engineer. I'm currently self-employed, been self-employed for about three years now. My company is named Bedrock Geocon Consult, and these days I'm providing two services. I provide geotechnical services to general contractors and expert geotechnical work for claims. Involving geotechnical engineers. I live and work here in Kansas City with my wife Molly, who I've been happily married to for 35 years. I've got two daughters, one grandchild, and another grandchild on the way

[00:00:48] Guy: Welcome Steve. You're such an interesting guy. I've really enjoyed our times together at GBA. So now I'm interested, and I'm sure our listeners are too, in peeling back the onion on Steve and learning about, what [00:01:00] you were like growing up. So maybe we can just go back in time, Steve.

[00:01:04] Tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what life was like back then.

[00:01:08] Steve: Sure. I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri is a blue collar neighborhood. Most of the dads in my neighborhood worked at factories. My dad was a factory worker. My mom was the school lunch lady, at the public school, the women making lunches for the kids and serving 'em up.

[00:01:27] That was my mom, and often she was. At the school where I attended, that was kind of fun. As youngest of four kids. All of them are a few years older than me. One interesting story that my mom told me because I was too young to remember that was a foreshadowing of my future career was. My mom told me when I was about three years old.

[00:01:47] Every time I went outside, I'd eat dirt. I'd grab a handful of dirt and just start eating it so frequently that she took me to the doctor and said, Hey, doc the kid eats dirt all the time. What do I do about that? And [00:02:00] doctor said, don't worry about it. It won't hurt him. If he wants to eat dirt, let him eat dirt.

[00:02:03] You are what you eat. I eat dirt. And what do you know? Now I'm a engineer.

[00:02:07] Guy: Was your mother horrified because she was the school lunch lady and her son was.

[00:02:11] Steve: Hadn't thought about that. Her sanitation sense was telling her it was all wrong. Yeah, you know, both my parents, you talking about formative things of my childhood, both my parents were children of the depression, grew up in the 1930s on farms and that was rough. They didn't have much growing up.

[00:02:30] So what they taught us kids was. You need to work, you need to work hard. You need to take care of yourself because you may be the only person who can take care of yourself. And I learned that lesson from them. My dad's education ended when he was 10 years old and the depression on a farm, he had to stop school and go to work, help feed the family. So I saw how that limited my dad's opportunities throughout his life. Being a factory worker without a high school diploma. [00:03:00] And it also meant we were poor at times. We had enough, we never went hungry, but we didn't take vacations, we didn't do traveling. But I grew up in that sort of environment.

[00:03:11] We had enough. And that was it. But I was certainly taught to work hard because that's what my parents had to do.

[00:03:18] Guy: So what were your other childhood interests? Steve? What'd you do for free times? You play sports or you have some hobbies or

[00:03:25] Steve: I played baseball and basketball as a kid, and I loved both of those. And I think my favorite thing was the community, the team being part of a group that was striving together to achieve something. So I really enjoyed my time

[00:03:39] playing baseball and basketball. I'm a big baseball enthusiast to now these days.

[00:03:45] Guy: Yeah, you're quite the the baseball aficionado. You know, a lot of little players and statistics and been to a lot of parks. You wanna talk about that briefly?

[00:03:53] Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Guy and I were talking earlier a life goal of mine is to visit every major league stadium, attend a game [00:04:00] there. I've been to 29 stadiums now. Nine of them are no longer in service, so I've got 10 more active stadiums to check off someday. But yeah, that's something I enjoy doing. I enjoy traveling and I try to squeeze in a baseball game whether I'm traveling for personal purposes or for business whenever I can.

[00:04:17] Yeah.

[00:04:18] Guy: We're diverging here, but I think it's a good segue. I remember you meeting Jim Abbott at one of our GBA conferences, and you had a lineup card from, I believe it was a college 

[00:04:29] Steve: Yeah, that's right. I went to graduate school at the University of Texas and UT's always had an outstanding baseball team. So, Jim Abbott, former major League pitcher, speaker at a GBA conference went to the University of Michigan and I remembered attending a game where he pitched against UT and I still had the scorecard and that was interesting sharing that with him.

[00:04:49] Yeah.

[00:04:49] Guy: That's when I realized Steve Wendland's a legit baseball aficionado. I don't even know how many lineup cards you still have, but the fact that you had that one was was pretty impressive.

[00:04:59] Steve: Yeah. And then [00:05:00] other childhood interest. My favorite toys, and again, the kind of vocational foreshadowing my favorite toys were my Lego bricks. I had a big bucket of Lego bricks. I still have them. And I'd take those bricks outside on our driveway or in my backyard, and I'd build cities with my matchbox cars, my Lego bricks, and I'd build cities buildings and now I'm a civil engineer.

[00:05:23] And the other interesting thing is. Like I said, we didn't have a lot as kids, but we had enough. And I had an area in my backyard. I called my dirt pile. My dad was keen on having a well manicured yard, but he let me take about a six foot diameter area and dig it up. Dig. So I was just diggin' in the soil. I now know I was digging in loess soil, L-O-E-S-S. For those of you that don't know what it is, it's my favorite type of soil. And that's what I was digging in as a kid. And I had to put my Lego bricks back there in my cars and I'd build cities in that dirt pile. And what do you know now?

[00:05:56] I'm a dirt engineer. Yeah.

[00:05:57] Guy: So were you making sure that those Lego [00:06:00] buildings were on stable ground?

[00:06:02] Steve: I do remember my dad was an avid gardener, so he knew soil from a different perspective and I had to show him I that some of the soil was different and essentially I was learning plasticity of the clay and talking to my dad about why some clay is sticky and some is not

[00:06:19] Guy: And you learned that on your own, or it's just intuitive.

[00:06:23] Steve: No. I just remember noticing as I was digging around that some of the clay was different than other clay and now I know many years later it's a difference of plasticity.

[00:06:32] Guy: So did those insert interest translate to school? And are you a good student? This is like, elementary school, middle school, high 

[00:06:40] Steve: Sure. I was a good student, very good at math. Always got good grades. I had a bad habit though occasionally of slopping through my work quickly getting it done. Taking the easy B rather than putting in the extra effort to get the A that I could get. And throughout my schooling, I had [00:07:00] teachers. Nudging me to get away from that explaining to me that's not the way to do it. Steve. I can even remember my first grade teacher, Mrs. Kazi. We were learning how to write three digit numbers and ilo through it, and made some mistakes. And she sat down with me and said, kid, you're better than this. You're smarter than this. You're trying to get this done too quickly and you're making mistakes. And I can remember back in first grade getting that lecture and a few more times throughout my, you know, first to eighth grade. Experience having teachers set me down and saying, you're a smart kid. You can do better than you're doing.

[00:07:33] And I think that gave me the passion that I've carried throughout my career to do high quality work. I've asked myself, where did this come from? Why is it important to me to have high quality work? And I think it comes back to those public school teachers when I was a kid, kind of pushing me in that direction.

[00:07:49] Guy: Was there a tipping point moment where you committed to being more detailed and complete?

[00:07:56] Steve: No I think it was just gradual along the way [00:08:00] guidance from my teachers, you know, high school I had fun in high school. Same thing though. I would occasionally take the easy B rather than put in the effort to get the a, you know, my fondest memory of high school is. Getting together with my buddies and playing Dungeons and Dragons in a basement of my house and my mom would make cookies for us.

[00:08:18] And what's fun is I still get together with those same guys and play similar games now 40 years later. And we usually do it here in the basement of my house

[00:08:26] Guy: Oh, no kidding. You stayed in touch with your high school buddies.

[00:08:29] Steve: Yeah.

[00:08:30] Guy: So, outside of school, Steve, did you have a side hustle? You have some kind of part-time work or maybe a summer job?

[00:08:36] Steve: Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, my parents' big teaching when we were kids is you have to work because that's you have to take care of yourself. And so when I turned 14, finally legally old enough to get a job my mom got a job for me. I was in ninth grade. Last year of junior high school and my mom got me a job at [00:09:00] my school cafeteria.

[00:09:01] Again, that's what my mom did for a living. She was a cafeteria lady and she knew the school cafeterias could hire kids from the school to do the heavy lifting. So I'd go in, in ninth grade. I'd show up an hour before school started every day, and go in the cafeteria and do the heavy lifting, a hundred pound bags of flour. These big tubs of dish soap that you had to load. And these giant dishwashers. Unload giant cases of canned green beans and mop the floor of the cafeteria. That was my job. Every day. I'd show up at school an hour early and do this work. And so when all the other kids were showing up for school, I'd already done my job and I'd already done my work.

[00:09:41] I was already there at school. So that was an, I think, a formative lesson to me of get up early, get to work, do your job, and then when when. Ninth grade was over at the end of that school year. Summertime came and I can remember my mom saying, okay kid, now you need to get another job. School's over.

[00:09:59] And she [00:10:00] handed me the newspaper, showed me how to read the help, wanted ads pointed at one for a dairy queen and said, dairy Queen in my neighborhood, you need to go apply for this job. So went to the Dairy Queen, got the job, and I spent the next three years, my high school years working at that Dairy Queen. Making hamburgers, mopping floors, and you know, I look back at it, it was a pretty crappy job, but I stuck with it sometimes. I'm a overly loyal person. My high school buddies all had better jobs, better paying, more interesting. Didn't have to mop floors but I stuck with it all three years at that Dairy Queen.

[00:10:33] Yeah, those are my early jobs.

[00:10:35] Guy: Are you still a fan of Dairy Queen? You stop in once in a while.

[00:10:38] Steve: I, I don't, because I think it just brings back memories of coming home, smelling like grease from flipping hamburgers for hours. Yeah.

[00:10:45] Guy: Progressing through your life, Steve you sort of, alluded to why you were interested in soils and civil engineering, but, you're nearing the end of high school. What was your thought process at that time in terms of your next steps?

[00:10:57] Steve: I didn't have much college education [00:11:00] around me. As I mentioned, my dad wasn't even a high school graduate, and I lived in a blue collar neighborhood, so it's not like I could see the dads around me with professional careers. They were all factory workers as well. My older brother had gone to college and studied accounting. But in my high school, I really didn't have much vocational guidance until one day my math teacher, probably junior year of high school, sat down with me and a couple other kids who were good at math and said, you're gonna be engineers and you're gonna attend the University of Missouri at Rolla. That's where I did my undergrad. That school's now changed names. It's Missouri University of Science and Technology. But that was pretty much the vocational guidance I had is this math teacher saying, you're gonna be an engineer and you're gonna go to this school, university of Missouri, Rolla. Now Missouri s and t is the engineering school of the University of Missouri system.

[00:11:52] It's in a small town Rolla, Missouri. It's a small school in the middle of the Ozarks. Really boring place, but it's a great place to [00:12:00] learn. It sounded good to me. I had a teacher telling me what to do. So then the question was what kind of engineering? And I had an opportunity this summer after my junior year of high school, university of Missouri, Rolla had a camp, essentially a week long camp. Where kids who had just finished their junior year of high school could go down to the university, live in the dorm for a week, and every day, two or three departments would put on presentations of here's what mechanical engineers do, here's what electrical engineers do, here's what civil engineers do. And there was a very charismatic geological engineering professor there who put on a presentation for geological engineering, and that looked interesting to me. I had this natural interest in earth science. He was very persuasive. So I chose geological engineering. I'll add one more thought to this.

[00:12:50] I had a lot of friends in high school told me, don't go to college. It's a waste of time. You can go to the neighborhood where I live, there's a giant Ford Motor Company assembly plant. You [00:13:00] go to work at the Ford factory and make plenty of money, have a good living, and don't waste your time with college.

[00:13:04] And a lot of my buddies went to work there and some of them still work there and it, is a good living. But it's different. And so I had some pushback to not go to college but I went, I'm glad I went. And so majored in geological engineering got my bachelor's degree in 86

[00:13:22] Guy: Before you leave that, Steve what did you think geological engineering was at that stage in your life? Did you know what you would be doing with it .

[00:13:28] Steve: no, uh, I just knew you dealt with the natural environment. You dealt with rocks, there. That was a time in the mid 1980s when environmental remediation was all it. There was so much opportunity business wise. The super fund, the EPA cleanups were just booming, and that was the guidance I got in colleges, going to environmental remediation because there's so much opportunity there.

[00:13:54] But I didn't like it. I didn't like the chemistry. I learned, I had [00:14:00] internships with Woodward, Clyde consultants in Kansas City, and I saw the environmental remediation work they were doing. I didn't like the paperwork, the bureaucracy associated with it. But I also saw. Geotechnical side, the foundation engineering side.

[00:14:15] I had a chance to observe foundation construction during those internships. And that's where I decided that was my interest was foundation work. You know, geotechnical engineering.

[00:14:26] Guy: So let's go progress then. You're getting out of college with a bachelor's degree. And you're starting on your path to being a professional. What was in your mind and what were your next steps?

[00:14:40] Steve: Well, one thing I'll add is probably one of the best decisions I ever made in my life while I was an undergrad at University of Missouri at Rolla was joining a fraternity, the Sigma Chi fraternity. That was a very formative process for me.

[00:14:53] The leadership accountability, teamwork I learned there. That was a great. Decision of [00:15:00] mine to join that fraternity. And I'm still active in it today, whenever I can and the great friendships I built there that are still with me today. So having said that, what's next? Early, my senior year of college, a professor pulled me aside and said, Hey kid, you're going to grad school, aren't you? And it hadn't even occurred to me that graduate school was a thing to consider. And this professor nudged me that way, and the managers at the Woodward Clyde office where I was, had my internships. Started pushing me that way too. So I decided to go to graduate school. My dad was pretty upset. He's like, okay, instead of going and getting a job and making big bucks, you're gonna spend money for two more years, going to graduate school.

[00:15:46] But I went to University of Texas at Austin and got a master's in civil slash geotechnical engineering, and that was such an incredible learning experience there at UT. You know, four of my professors eventually won [00:16:00] Terzaghi awards, you know, the top tier for the academics in our line of work. I learned so much there at University of Texas and two years later had my master's degree.

[00:16:10] Guy: Did you do a thesis option, Steve?

[00:16:12] Steve: Yeah. And the conclusion of my thesis was this test doesn't work.

[00:16:16] I was working on my advisor, Priscilla Nelson, she's a geological engineering background. Like me. We were, me and two other PhD students were trying to develop a laboratory test. Where a, a weak limestone, a chalk, we could test in the laboratory, the side shear resistance.

[00:16:35] It would provide to a drilled shaft foundation. So a laboratory test where you could directly measure the side shear resistance you might get for a drilled shaft in that weak rock. And we were trying all sorts of different things in the lab to create this test and it didn't work. So, yeah I wrote a master's thesis and the conclusion was, this doesn't work .

[00:16:53] Guy: So it's probably not heavily cited at this point. So you're getting out of grad school now and you must be [00:17:00] ready to make some money. What were your career choices at that time?

[00:17:04] Steve: I wanted to come back to Kansas City area. So I got a job with Black and Veatch giant engineering and construction firm, the firm that's headquartered here in Kansas City. I worked in their power division, which they did design and construction. Almost everything was designed build. Electrical generation facilities, and electric transmission lines. So for the next 11 years, that's what I did is geotechnical work. Associated with power plants and electric transmission lines. I was part of a group when I first started of about 15 geotechnical engineers and engineering geologists that provided internal geotechnical support to those projects. We didn't have to do any marketing, any business development 'cause we were just an internal support to this vertically integrated team. Like I said, it was design build,

[00:17:55] Guy: You traveled the world with them, right, Steve?

[00:17:57] Steve: Yeah, so there was a lot of [00:18:00] travel and in the early nineties, black and Veatch started focusing more on their international opportunities. I did long-term field assignments in New Mexico and Oregon, like a year in each of those places watching construction. But then in the nineties it started changing to international travel. I had opportunities to travel and work all across the world. Thailand, Guatemala, Argentina, Turkey, Pakistan. Taiwan, on and on, and those were incredible opportunities. Black and Veatch just threw you in the deep end, and it was up to you to figure it out. You're the lead geotechnical engineer on this massive project, and you're on the other side of the world. Figure it out. 

[00:18:40] Guy: Lots of different soil types too, right?

[00:18:42] Steve: yeah. Yeah. I can remember learning about volcanic soils in Guatemala. And you know, the deep swamps of Bangkok, Thailand, kind of similar to what we have here in Louisiana. You know, this is before global telecom. My cell phone didn't work in [00:19:00] Thailand. You couldn't send an email across the globe. So I'd be standing at a construction site in Thailand and nobody else speaks English and I've gotta talk to the driller, figure out how to communicate to the driller what I want with the soil sample.

[00:19:12] So yeah, that was great. Opportunities at international work. And one other thing I learned at Black and Veatch is to make yourself a technical expert. If you see that your firm needs technical expertise in a certain area and nobody's got it, then make yourself that expert. When I was at Black and Veatch I, learned that they needed to step up their game on how they did the lateral load analysis for deep foundation.

[00:19:40] So I learned L pile backwards and forwards. I learned how deep foundations on large mats, you know, turbine mats, boiler mats for these big power plants. I learned how to analyze those better than what they were doing and became that expert. I built expertise for geotechnical work on long electric transmission lines.

[00:19:59] [00:20:00] Some of these power lines are 200 miles, 300 miles long, and you've gotta figure out how to do a subsurface exploration for that long of a project. That's what I'd communicate to others is you can make yourself an expert. You can, if you see a need, step in, fill that need work on those types of projects, do the study and make yourself an expert.

[00:20:18] It will provide opportunity for you. And I think my passion for high quality work helped me there. I developed a way of doing very understandable calculations, high quality calculations, a packet of printouts that you could hand to somebody else and they could follow, and I was proud of that.

[00:20:36] Uh, but yeah, black and Veatch, 11 years

[00:20:40] great 

[00:20:40] Guy: a lot, lot to pack in, in 11 years. And actually I love talking to Steve about his time then, because he's really been all over. But let's continue the story and moving forward towards how did you get to be a private consultant from, tell me, tell fill in the gaps there from then till now.

[00:20:56] Steve: Well, 96 at Black and Veach. I got promoted for the [00:21:00] first time I was in charge of people. I got promoted to that group of 15 geotechnical engineers and engineering geologists. And it really didn't go that well. I had no training. It's like, okay, you're a good engineer, so here you'll be in charge now. And it was really stressful for me. So after doing that, a few years of being in charge of that group I decided it was time to move on. Go to work for a geotechnical firm rather than being in this little support group within a giant firm. So I left there went to work in 1999 for a firm called Geosystems Engineering. Geosystems was a Midwestern firm with about 200 people, six offices. And I was hired to be the engineering manager for their Kansas City office. And that was a good experience. They were an A SFE now GBA member firm. So that was my first exposure to ASFE working [00:22:00] for Geosystems. I was a partner there. I bought into the firm as a first time. I had an opportunity for ownership where I was working and I was on the board of directors there, so I got to see how the firm ran. We sold that firm in 2002, so three years later we sold it to Kleinfelderer. Kleinfelderer was looking to expand into the Midwest. We at Geosystems had an ownership transition problem. The two guys who had founded the firm and owned a majority of it were looking to cash out to get their money out.

[00:22:31] And the junior partners like me didn't have the financial resources to do that. We sold the firm to Kleinfelderer, and that was a good thing. It gave me opportunity to connect with Kleinfelderer nationwide. I got promoted to being the area manager for the Kansas City operations 60 employees doing geotech, CoMET environmental services.

[00:22:56] I was in charge. I learned business [00:23:00] operations and, but. I also learned that the downside at that time, Kleinfelderer had some serious geographic silos. The offices didn't cooperate. We had no financial incentive to help other offices, loan them people, give them work, even let 'em borrow my drill rigs, didn't do it.

[00:23:19] It was very siloed. So there I am 2002. I'm running an office with 60 people and I just didn't like it. It's a very stressful job for me. I didn't like the budgeting. Our office made good profit, but we always fell a little bit short of our profit goals. So there was always pressure to make a little more profit. There was HR problems as the area manager, I had to deal with people issues, and sometimes those were very serious people issues. And I just didn't care for that. So I quit in 2006 left Kleinfelderer, and you'll learn here in a minute. I eventually go back, but what's interesting [00:24:00] is, is the person I quit on, the person who was my regional manager at the time. Was Joel Carson, now executive director of GBA. Joel was a regional manager and I was an area manager. So Joel was a person I got to turn my, resignation into. You know, one thing that happened though we talk about little nudges, little unexpected things that later have a great influence on your career.

[00:24:25] In 2005, I got called out to a project site as the area manager. We had a good client, a commercial developer. Who we'd done a lot of work for and they had built a three story office building and they'd built it speculatively. So after it was built, it sat there empty for a year or so, and within that year, the floor slab, the slab on grade had heaved a little and cracked.

[00:24:50] And the owner, the developer, was very upset and called everybody out there. And so I came out there to represent Kleinfelderer as a geotechnical engineer and special [00:25:00] inspector, structural engineers there, and the contractors there, the president of the general contractor came to have this meeting and the owner starts chewing out that contractor saying, this floor slabs cracked because of what you did.

[00:25:13] And I stepped in and defended that general contractor and said, no. The floor slabs crack because all floor slabs crack. Unless you tell the design team, you don't want your floor slab to crack. Especially where we are, where we have some expansive clays, it's gonna crack. And that president of that general contractor was so impressed that I stepped in to defend him against the owner's wrath that they started hiring me and that contractor's JE Dunn Construction. They've been my best client for 20 years now, and so you never know when a little meeting like that is gonna provide an opportunity that will provide you benefit the rest of your career.

[00:25:51] Guy: Well that was, that's a great story, Steve, in the interest of time, can you accelerate through to from then till now?

[00:25:57] Steve: Yeah. So 2006 I left Kleinfelderer. I [00:26:00] went to work for a small, local really small geotechnical firm. Opened a Kansas City office for him. It was just eight of us in that office. We rode out the Great Recession, 2008, 2009, 10. Those were some tough times, but we got through it. That was a good chance for me to get back in the field.

[00:26:18] You know, 20 years into my career I was slumping concrete again. But it's good to do that occasionally to remember. What that's all about. But I didn't see eye to eye with the owners of that firm. So 2000, late 2010, first of 2011, I came back to work for Kleinfelderer. Joel Carson still there, hired me back in a technical role.

[00:26:37] So that early 2011 was the end of my career working in operations management. That never went well with me. It was always very stressful. So I come back to Kleinfelderer in a technical role. I'm hired to be the retaining wall practice leader, a nationwide position. Kleinfelderer had had some serious liability issues, [00:27:00] some legal claims related to retaining wall failures, and they wanted to clean that up to improve. How they were doing retaining wall work. So that was my gig, was to build a team nationwide of geotechnical engineers, geostructural engineers, to do all their work on serious retaining wall work. And that was a great opportunity for me to build my technical career path, which i've been writing ever since I was promoted 2014 to be in the national Geotechnical Director for Kleinfelderer, which meant from a quality point of view and expertise.

[00:27:33] I was in charge of about 220 geotechnical engineers and now for three years I've been self-employed again, providing technical services to lawyers on legal claims, and also to still working for those general contractors and helping them get out of geotechnical problems. Yeah.

[00:27:50] Guy: That's a hell of a career, Steve. I wish these podcasts could go longer 'cause I'm sure there's a lot more lessons in there. I did hear Joel Carson name come up a couple times, so one of the questions I [00:28:00] usually ask is, what was your connection to first connection to GBA or ASFE as it used to be called?

[00:28:06] So I'm guessing it may be Joel, but I don't know. I'll ask you the question. How did you get to GBA?

[00:28:11] Steve: Well, I'd always been reading the NewsLog, looking at publications, seeing the tools that GBA and ASFE had to offer, but I wasn't directly involved until 2015. Joel Carson gets recruited away from Kleinfelder and becomes the executive director of GBA. And our other person who was most involved at the time left the firm.

[00:28:37] So Kleinfelder needed somebody to step up and become active in GBA. So I said, Hey, I'd love to do that. I was their director of geotechnical engineering. It was a good opportunity for me. So basically, once Joel became executive director, Kleinfelder had needed other people to step up become involved and that's how I got involved.

[00:28:56] Yeah. 

[00:28:56] Guy: And you've served time on our board of directors at [00:29:00] GBA and chaired committees, and it's done a lot for GBA.

[00:29:03] Steve: Yeah.

[00:29:04] Guy: So Steve, you've had a heck of a career and when you go back to when you first came outta school in the mid eighties, and you touched on this and your journey story, but what have you seen change the most over, over that time in the geoprofession?

[00:29:22] Steve: I think about that, the first thing that comes to mind is all the hype now about AI and how AI, boy, that's really gonna change how we do work, but I don't think the changes that will be brought on by AI are as big as what I've already seen in my career. To me the, biggest changes were early in my career were computerized drafting and use of word processors instead of typing.

[00:29:45] Yeah. I'm old enough that was just happening when I came into the workplace. We used to have, huge numbers of drafters at Black and Veatch because drafting was still being done partially by hand and very difficult computer applications. So to me, [00:30:00] how simple drafting has become now, we don't really even have drafters now.

[00:30:04] We just create, the engineers, create their own drawings and word processing has gotten to the point where we don't have typists. We have far fewer administrative people doing that ourselves. So those are two big changes in how the work's done. Having the internet with email global telecom, third generation cell phones started hitting the market in 97, 98 and suddenly you could talk to your person in the field, even if they were a thousand miles away, they could call in and say, Hey, this happened unexpectedly. What do I do? To me that was a huge change. Those are the biggest changes that I've experienced is. Technology related, and I think they'll continue to be technology related. You know, some of the business changes, the consolidation of firms the fact that the great geotechnical firms from 30 years ago don't exist anymore, that's another change as well too.

[00:30:56] Guy: How about the opposite, the flip of that question. So what do you think are the core [00:31:00] competencies of geoprofessionals that have remained constant over your career?

[00:31:05] Steve: I think of three things. I can remember a professor in graduate school telling me as a geotechnical engineer, everything will always come down to shear strength and effective stress. Everything you do will be related to shear strength of the soil and the effective stress on the soil, and I find that true time and again that no matter what we're doing, you have to have a good theoretical understanding of how the soil is behaving. What is its strength? What is the effective stress? Second is people oriented. The golden rule always applies and always will apply. Treat people around you how you wanna be treated, whether they're a technician that's three notches down the totem pole from you or the CEO of the company, who's three notches above you on the totem pole. Treat people well. And then last it's, I think the most important lesson is the importance of good communication [00:32:00] skills, whether oral or written communication. I've learned that time and again through my career. That having good communication skills will do more to advance your career, to make your job enjoyable, to make your job easier, and it takes practice . For me. Communication skills, whether oral or written, didn't come easy. It takes practice, it takes training, but I've certainly seen the benefit of that.

[00:32:28] Guy: What steps did you take to improve your communication? Steve?

[00:32:33] Steve: I can remember two incidences, and again, these career nudges. My last year of graduate school, I was turning in a paper for a class, and the professor, Dr. David Daniel, rather than just hand it back to me he found me and he sat down with me and he said, kid, you don't know how to write. Nobody's ever taught you how to write.

[00:32:52] You know, I had technical writing class in college and freshman comp, but he said, nah, you don't understand that. You [00:33:00] shouldn't use passive voice unless you have to. And Dr. Daniel sat down with me and started. As an engineering professor, teach me how to write and that was the first nudge with written on the oral communication side, 1992, Black and Veatch.

[00:33:14] I'm working on this giant project and as part of my annual review, I have to get feedback from the client and much to my surprise, they gave me negative feedback. They said, we can't understand when Steve talks to us. He's way too technical. When he speaks, they were engineers, but they weren't geotechnical engineers. That was the nudge from a client saying, you need to speak more clearly. So what do I do? Well, you learn how to write . You read manuals on good writing. You ask professional writers to review your written product. On the oral communication. It's just practice. I took a Dale Carnegie class, Kleinfelder paid for that.

[00:33:55] Learning how to speak professionally, which helped a lot. But do a lot of [00:34:00] presentations. Talk to people, make presentations to your school, your local ASCE chapter. It takes practice and you can improve your communication skills.

[00:34:09] Guy: That's great background and really advice, but back to the geoprofession as you look forward then, we talked about looking back over your career, what do you see coming where are the opportunities for geoprofessionals in the next five to 10 years?

[00:34:26] Steve: I think the biggest opportunities will be on the ground improvement side, what the specialty contractors are doing with ground improvement as they figure out new and better ways to improve the ground so that you don't have to put. $10 million worth of pile foundations under that building. I think there's great opportunity there. I see my general contractor clients are wanting to do more and more of the engineering in-house, including geotechnical engineering, general contractors who 10 or 15 years ago didn't want to touch the engineering [00:35:00] side of things. They're now hiring engineers so they can do it themselves. So I see opportunity there on the construction side and then. Lastly, I get paid a lot to do third party geotechnical peer reviews for these general contractors. They want my opinion before they start construction, and sometimes I'm handed drawing sets that are hundreds, if not thousands of pages of drawings. And that's just a technology that doesn't work anymore. Flipping through thousand pages of drawings to figure out how you're gonna build something, I think we're gonna shift to augmented reality, virtual reality, instead of flipping through pages and pages of structural details, you're just gonna put on a headset and take a three dimensional tour of the project.

[00:35:44] And I gotta think that's where we're heading. And there'll be a lot of opportunity there as geotechnical engineers figure out how to work in that environment.

[00:35:51] Guy: Okay. Let's move to the the infamous speed round. Steve, are you ready for the speed round?

[00:35:57] Steve: I am.

[00:35:58] Guy: All right, so this is the [00:36:00] part of our interview where we ask everybody the same questions, and hopefully at some point we'll be able to compile these and come up with great words of wisdom.

[00:36:10] So I'll start with hopefully an easy one. Your favorite books, Steve, there's anything that you've read that you know really sticks out to you as a great read.

[00:36:18] Steve: Yeah, and I don't read business leadership books when I read. It's for enjoyment or to broaden my mind. But I've got two books to share that both have a geo connection. My favorite novel is a science fiction novel called Hyperion, H-Y-P-E-R-I-O-N. Published in 1989, the author's, Dan Simmons and Hyperion is the story of what it means to be human in the far future. Humans are really intertangled with their computers, their AIs, and they're doing genetic manipulation. And this is I begs the question, at what point are you no longer human if you've become entangled with your computers and manipulated genetics? Where there's a geo connection [00:37:00] here is this novel introduced me to a real world geologist, a guy who lived a hundred years ago, a geologist named a Frenchman named Pierre Thar de Jarden. Go by the first part of his last name, thar, T-E-I-L-H-A-R-D. He got his PhD in geology in France in the 1920s. Then interestingly, he became a Roman Catholic priest, and I'm Roman Catholic. He was a Jesuit priest who became one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century. And combining his geologic background with his Christian beliefs, he guided the Catholic church as it embraced evolution. And that's why he's in this book is the book deals with how will Humanity evolve as we deal with genetic manipulation and computers. So again, the book's Hyperion, it's great book and it's got a geo influence in it.

[00:37:55] Guy: Well, that's one I have not heard before, so I will add that to my list of future reads. [00:38:00] Go ahead. You have another one.

[00:38:01] Steve: second one, Christian Bible Gospel. According to John chapter nine, Jesus heals a blind man with spit and dirt. He picks up dirt spits in his hand, rubs it in the guy's eyes, and heals him. And so as a geotechical engineer, seeing a miracle performed with. With soil. It's great. There's a lot of great lessons there about why is there suffering in the world?

[00:38:23] What does it mean to be blind, and why did Jesus use spit and dirt to heal the guy? Great story. Great lessons there.

[00:38:30] Guy: Do you think there's any scientific background in that?

[00:38:33] Steve: No, he was just doing it to show a point that he could do it with .

[00:38:37] Guy: Wait, you are geo through and through Steve. Okay. So, more broadly, you look at the geoprofession, today and look forward, what's your optimism index for our profession, Steve, one being, very low and five being very high.

[00:38:52] Steve: I'm gonna go with a three, and I wish I could say four, but I still see so much headache, problem [00:39:00] damage caused by commoditization in our field. Maybe my perspective is influenced because I'm working on legal claims where things haven't gone well and I'm working for general contractors who don't trust the geotechnical information they're getting. But I still see a lot of poor quality geotechnical consulting work going on. And it continues to cause our full industry to suffer.

[00:39:25] Guy: Can I pull that thread for a second, 

[00:39:27] Steve: Sure, sure. 

[00:39:28] Guy: So what do you think that contractors don't trust about geotechnical information? Please elaborate.

[00:39:33] Steve: Sure they don't trust that they know what they're gonna be excavating into. A lot of geotechical reports don't get good long-term groundwater depth measurements, for example. And then the contractor has to dig a 30 foot deep sewer trench and they've got water coming in unexpectedly, and their contract says , that's their problem.

[00:39:51] They took the subsurface risks.

[00:39:53] Guy: Fair, enough. I was curious and I think that's a good good anecdote for our listeners, in terms of how other people see and receive our [00:40:00] product

[00:40:01] Steve: Yeah.

[00:40:01] And. Sure. The other part of that frustration is because I'm working with the contractors, I see the list of the design team. Here's the structural engineer, here's the architect, here's even the kitchen equipment consultant and the security consultant, and they don't list the geotechnical engineer 80% of the time.

[00:40:21] Sometimes they do, but it's frustrating to me that the geotechnical firm isn't considered part of the design team. They've written their report, they're done, they're off the job. We geotechnical engineers, we geoprofessionals, need to figure out how to stay in that design team in that collaborative role.

[00:40:38] From this time we started work until the construction's completed.

[00:40:43] Guy: That's good advice as well. Nice perspective. So looking at your, again, at your career, Steve, when you look back on, the 40 so years that you've been practicing, what's, what are you most proud of in your professional life? Is there a project or an outcome or something that you were, part of that you [00:41:00] just really feel good about today?

[00:41:02] Steve: What makes me feel good is the many times I've bumped into a geoprofessional, usually younger than me that I worked with 10, 20 years earlier, and they say. Here's something you've taught me that I haven't forgotten, that I still use, that I still do. Usually it's technical mentoring. You showed me the right way to prepare a calculation. You explained to me the concept of long-term shear strength of a clay fill. It makes me feel good when. Years later a young engineer is thanking me for the technical mentoring I gave them before it happened recently in a legal claim. I was working where one of the other experts had been a young engineer working with my group years before, and he was real happy that he was now an expert sitting at the same table as me.

[00:41:54] And it made me feel good that he's yeah, I've reached Steve's level. I'm an expert here. So, yeah.

[00:41:58] Guy: That's awesome.

[00:41:59] A [00:42:00] lot of pride there. So the flip of this question, and this has not been a very good question for this podcast so I'm gonna try and ask it in different ways to elicit, more interesting answers when you look back through your career are there forks in the road that you came to where you went one direction and now you wonder, what if I had done something out the other option instead and, where would that have led me?

[00:42:23] Steve: Yeah. What comes to mind for me is I'm self-employed now, been self-employed for three years. It's going very well. I enjoy the work. There's plenty of opportunity out there, and I, in 2010, I considered taking that plunge actually. Prepared a business plan, talked to some lawyers, talked to some bankers, and at that time I wasn't ready to take the risk. And maybe that was the right decision then, but I now look back and think, okay, 2016, I started having some job dissatisfaction. I wasn't real happy with my job. I should have become self-employed. [00:43:00] Earlier. Earlier, what held me back is I don't like doing business development. I'm an introvert. Don't ask me to do sales.

[00:43:06] And hey, if you're self-employed, it's all up to you. So, that's what held me back at that time. But now I look back and I know from my current experience, you do good work. The work, there's plenty of opportunity out there. It's gonna show up even if you don't like doing business development. So to answer your question, I should have become self-employed sooner than I did.

[00:43:25] Guy: Okay. And that's a little bit of segue into my last question, which is, again, one piece of advice that you would offer, from your extensive experience in this career to someone that would be, coming into the profession today.

[00:43:37] Steve: I'd say there's lots of opportunity and there's always gonna be lots of opportunity. When somebody asks you, what do you want to do in five years or 10 years? My response was, I don't know, but I know there's gonna be opportunities. So sharpen your skills, technical skills, people skills, business skills, and there will be opportunity there.

[00:43:55] Don't worry about that, it'll happen. Just make yourself ready for those [00:44:00] opportunities. Focus on your communication skills. To me, that's the one skillset that provides the most opportunity for you. Oral and written. Practice it, train it and the technical career path does work. You don't have to be a project manager.

[00:44:15] You don't have to be an operations manager. You can have a rewarding career as a technically oriented geotechnical engineer still requires leadership. You can't just lock yourself in your office and not work with people, but you can provide your leadership through the technical career path and have a rewarding career.

[00:44:34] Guy: Amen to that, Steve. In the end it is a technical profession and, technical means something in geoprofession. Okay. That's pretty much the end of the interview, but I will give you the last word. Steve. Is there anything that you wanna reflect on for our listeners that we didn't have opportunity to cover through now?

[00:44:53] Steve: Yeah. One thing that comes to mind that I didn't slip in, even though I'm a very talkative person was learning from your [00:45:00] mistakes, how important that is. I spent half my time now working as an expert on legal claims, and that means somebody made a mistake somewhere and I first got dragged into litigation in 2002, and it wasn't fun. But I learned from that and decided it's time to learn from your mistakes. And I had bosses who had an opportunity to fire engineers 'cause the engineer made a mistake. But instead those bosses, 30 years ago said, no, I'm not gonna fire the engineers. I'm just gonna insist that they learn from their mistakes and they not do this again. So I think that's such a great lesson in our risky line of work. When there's a mistake, whether you made it or somebody else, the best thing you can do is learn from that. Like the GBA case histories is figure out what went wrong, how to prevent it, learn from it, and try to avoid it happening again.

[00:45:50] Guy: That's a great point, and I'm glad you brought that up, Steve. So we're gonna wrap this interview now. Steve, I want to thank you for being a great presenter today. I learned a [00:46:00] lot. I think you offer a, a very interesting perspective. And again, my only regret is I wish we had another half hour or 45 minutes to dig more into those career stories.

[00:46:09] But I also want to thank our listeners, thank you for, tuning into this episode of GeoHeroes Podcast and sticking with us through the end of the podcast. So with that, we're gonna sign off. Thank you, Steve.

[00:46:21] Steve: Mm-hmm.