Engineering a Legacy: Rick Moore's Journey from Vietnam to Water Solutions

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

If you believe, you can achieve Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast. A show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today, I'm joined by Rick Moore. He is the founder of Moore Engineering. He has over 40 years of experience in engineering. He is a Vietnam veteran. So, Rick, thank you for your service. He served as a lieutenant for the Army Corps of Engineers and he worked on major construction projects. And then he switched over to working on water projects. So Rick is all things water. He's uh internationally known for his water projects, and uh he is here today to be talking about his experience. He says he has a couple topics that he wants to cover, so we're going to be weaving that into the conversation. So, Rick, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Well, uh, it's good to start with a little commercial. Um, I've written three books, they're all memoirs. Um, and Curtis, you uh are at least familiar with the second one, which is called An Officer's Journey about my two years in the Army. First year was uh at the Army Engineering School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where I had the uh distinct honor uh to teach um in the Army Engineering School. It was a fabulous experience. And then I was platoon leader uh with an engineering battalion in Vietnam, and we were building a road in the Central Highlands. Uh and that book is sandwiched between an earlier one, which covers my time up to the the time I go into the army through through college. I was an ROTC, that's why I was commissioned as a lieutenant in the corps, because I was also a civil engineer out of Lafayette College. And the the title of the first book is called A Charmed Young Life. Um, and I I was really charmed. Uh I grew up, spent a good deal of my professional career in the second half of the 20th century, where uh I had good parents, wonderful parents. I I'm dyslexic, so I didn't do well early in school, and my parents supported me uh unconditionally. It was, I couldn't have done it without them. Uh and I had good teachers and and mentors. And uh, you know, I was a white guy in the second half of the 20th century. You know, I didn't have to compete with a lot of minorities or even women, particularly in the engineering field. Uh now it's it's probably 50-50, uh, which is uh good for the health of the industry. But that's why I called my my first book, A Charmed Young Life. And then I went into two years in the Army, and then the third book covers my consulting career uh in the uh water field, both uh domestically and internationally. Um I kind of rode the wave. Again, it was a charmed part of my life. Uh I got into the environmental water business in the 1970s, right after the Congress passed uh the Clean Water Act and pumped billions of dollars. Well, it was probably millions back in those days, but today it's billions, um, into uh cleaning up the nation's waters. And and I rode that crest for 30 or 40 years. And then the second half of that book, which is called a consultant's story, it's about how to be a consultant. And I I teach college kids who are going into the engineering field who really don't have any clue about what a consulting engineer does. Uh, I try to help them with that. And um after I spent the time domestically, I uh the the last part of my full-time career, I'm sort of semi-retired, I spent in India, and the second half of the book is about my couple years uh uh uh in in India. Um and of course, this was 50 years after I started or so, uh, and they had the same problems uh the U.S. had in the 1970s, probably worse. Uh so we did, I think, uh for the Bang for the Buck, we did a lot of good good work in India to help clean up their their rivers and uh and waterways. And um so those are the the the three books I'm uh I'm promoting. I hope people read them. I think they'll get a an idea of what um first of all what we Vietnam was like, uh, and secondly, what it is like to be a consultant uh in the uh environmental in the environmental field.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Well, what where can uh listeners uh check out those books at?

SPEAKER_02 5:29

Um well I I can send you the titles, they're all on Amazon, uh either at at a Kindle, you know, the the digital version, or in paperback. Uh the first one's a a charmed young life, the second one's an officer's journey, and the third one is a consultant's story. And just use my full name, Richard, middle initial A more, M-O-O-R-E, and you can find them.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

All right, well, talk about how working with the Army Corps of Engineers as a lieutenant, shape the engineer and leader that you have become today.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

The two themes that I like to drive home um when I talk to groups is the first one I I call getting out of your comfort zone. And the second one is working with teens. So you couldn't have asked for a better um opportunity for a young, 20 young, you know, I was 22, 23-year-old, right out of college, uh, virtually no experience. And going to, well, teaching, of course, was a was not, you know, uh an enormous out-of-year-comfort zone experience. But I knew I did not know how to teach. And the Army taught me how to teach. And it was it was an invaluable lesson uh for the next 50 years of my career. Every time I stood up in front of a planning board or a a convention, uh, I had that confidence of a whole year teaching in the Army Engineers School. And the the funny part about it is I really had no credentials to teach. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I had a civil engineer degree. I was lieutenant, and most of the people I taught were captains and majors. Uh, and it was an invaluable uh experience. The second year, of course, was in Vietnam, and that was genuinely an out-of-your-comfort zone experience. And my my point here is that people get in their comfort zone. I mean, it's just natural. You do what you're good at, you do it day in, day out, week in, year in, year out, and you feel comfortable doing it. But my argument is that you have to force yourself. In this case, I was forced. I I really, you know, had no choice. I mean, I joined the ROTC voluntarily, but they sent me to Vietnam. I didn't have a choice, but it certainly put me out of my comfort zone. And that's when you learn the most. Uh, new experiences, new people, new responsibilities, new, and this is the key new risks. You got to take risks. And risks has a two-edged sword. If you take a risk and you're right, you look like a hero. I mean, I I played a lot of sports, and I I was okay. I was actually pretty good when I was younger. And but I was good because I would anticipate and take a risk that somebody was going to be in a certain place at a certain time. And so if I got there, I look like a hero. And and that's a that's a risk that works. But really, the most important risks are the ones that don't work. And and that's where you learn. And that and and it's not everybody makes mistakes. I mean, inevitable. Every day we make mistakes. It's not that we make mistakes, it's how we deal with the mistakes. And that's when you're out of your comfort zone, you take a risk, you make a mistake, you may in a moment feel like you know you're uh you're a failure. But if you buck up and deal with that um uh uh risk or mistake uh in a forthright manner, uh you're gonna come out and five, ten, fifteen years from now, you'll draw on those experiences to be be a much better uh whatever you're doing. So that's the uh uh that's the kind of thing that that I think the army, particularly the tour uh in Vietnam, helped me understand. And I'll talk a little bit about leadership approaches in a bit, but let me give you a quick example. Um we were in the Central Highlands in in Vietnam, and we were building a road, and you need rock for the base course of the road. And we had a rock quarry, a rock crusher, we had all, we were completely self-sufficient because we were, you know, miles and miles and miles away from any uh substantial uh base. Uh but what what you need for asphalt to put on the road, you need obviously the asphalt, and then you need sand and gravel to put in as a binder. And we didn't have any sand up in the central highlands. We couldn't, you know, we couldn't find any. So we had to crush rock basically to a sand consistency, which is very difficult, very hard to do, and you lose most of it in the wind. So one time one of the other lieutenants we were talking, and he had just gone to get some water in a nearby river. We had a compound, a battalion compound of about 500 people, so we we need a lot of water. And he said, you know, there's big sandbars in this river. Why don't we take a grater, which is a huge piece of equipment? It's like two tractor trailers, it's a huge piece of equipment. We'll go down to the river and we'll scrape out the sand in the grater, and we'll bring it back and we'll dump it next to the asphalt plant, and we'll have our grass, our sand. We wouldn't have to crush it. Seemed like a great idea. We didn't want to tell uh the XO and the battalion commander because we figured they'd nix our idea. So we snuck out the next morning, drove the grater into the river to scrape out the sand, and the damn thing got stuck. And we couldn't get it out. So at that point, we had to come clean, tell the uh XO, a major uh executive officer of the battalion, and we thought we were we were gonna get court-martialed. And and he came down, looked, and he said, Well, we can't deal with it, we got to get back, can't stay out here at night, it's too dangerous. Uh but he understood, I mean, he he chewed us a new asshole, but he, you know, he we knew he understood that damn it, this was a pretty good risk. It didn't pan out, but it was a pretty good risk. So uh that's the kind of thing that when you get out of your comfort zone, you take those risks. And of course, in a military situation, taking a risk is a different equation than is uh here at home. But nevertheless, that that's the you know that's sort of the message uh that I would have about getting outside your comfort zone.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Well, you know, most people take water for granted until it's no longer available, just like here. I mean, we recently had a bar of water advisory uh due to power loss because of a storm at the water plant. But what are some of the problems that the world faces when it comes to clean water and waste management?

SPEAKER_02 14:42

Well, uh uh you know, uh war as somebody said not too long ago, uh water is the new gold or the new new oil. Because, you know, there's very little you can do without um water. Now, obviously there's plenty of water. Uh uh you're in Chicago, so uh you have the Great Lakes. Plenty of water in the Great Lakes. Uh but that's clean water, and that's you know, that you can treat that and and drink it without a great deal of effort. But if you're on the coasts, uh there's plenty of water in the ocean. And uh we can use that water if we use desalinization processes. The problem with that is that it's an it's an expensive process, energy-intense and expensive process to turn salt water into drinking water. And then the third way is to take wastewater and recycle it, treat it to a very high degree, and either put it back in the ground where you can recycle it or directly use it for irrigation or you know, crops or uh, you know, in the in the extreme, use it as drinking water. The the problem is, like most problems, is cost. Um, people are used to turning on the tap, uh not worrying how long it stays on, watering their green grass, and paying, you know, a couple dollars a month for the water. Well, it actually water's almost been free, and that's the the mindset of most people, at least in this country, is that utilities that have we we have a water-rich country for the most part, unless you're in Arizona, um, and water has been cheap, very cheap. I'm in in New England, we have you know 50 inches of rain a year, we have plenty of water, and people don't want to pay for it. But the utility to maintain it and to make it safe and and effective and reliable costs, you know, now, you know, it costs millions of dollars. And politicians are are loath to to spend money on a pipe that nobody can seize until that pipe uh breaks. Uh and and and so the uh politicians have been deferring maintenance, you know, for the last 50 or 100 years, and it's starting to come back to haunt us. But there's plenty of water, it's just a matter of how you manage it. Um, you know, in in uh uh Bermuda, for decades, they've been collecting water off their roof in in uh essentially clean 55-gallon drums. Uh we we just assume water is free, uh, but it's not. And with you know, climate change and the um and the droughts, uh, and uh you just have to look at the water level in Lake Mead behind uh Hoover Dam, and it's it's dropped like I don't know, 50, 80 feet in the last couple of years. They've had a 20-year drought. Uh and so uh so they're grappling with that, you know, and a you know, right today, right now. Um, and a lot of the rest of the world, uh, whether it be the Middle East, in fact, the Israelis uh have done most uh uh extraordinary work in membrane technology, which is the technology you use to purify water. In other words, you force dirty water through a membrane, uh, and the membrane uh removes the the pollutants in the water, and on the other side of the membrane you have clean water. The problem is it takes a lot of pressure, which takes a lot of energy to push that water through the membrane. And the Israelis over the last 25 years have done remarkable work to bring that technology cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. It's like the cost of solar. Um uh it's gone down, you know, in the last 20 years by like 90 percent, uh, and they're constantly uh innovating. There's an enormous amount of innovation. Um, and it's it would be a shame if the federal government cuts money off innovation, whether it be you know medical or uh water or whatever kind of uh you know cutting-edge technology. That's our future. And uh the the other, you know, the idea of risk comes in too, because in order to get a project, I mean a product that can go to market, you you make hundreds of mistakes. Uh, and you just got to keep going, but you need the funding to keep going. So there's there's plenty of water. It's how it's managed and and how it has been culturally devalued, actually, over the last 50 years, because it's been so cheap.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Well, I know you spent 40 years working on complex projects. So talk about uh what separates a successful project from one that struggles or fails.

SPEAKER_02 20:05

Well, that gets into that's a perfect segue into what my second main point is, and that's working with teams. Uh uh in the consulting business, all the consulting businesses is a series of projects. You know, you you win a project from a client, whether it be a public project or a private project, and then you have a you know you have a budget, you have a schedule, and you have a contract that tells you sort of your level of quality. So there's three things you need to uh understand doing a project schedule, budget, and and what quality you have to produce. And it doesn't have to be perfect, and that's that's key. In fact, it shouldn't be perfect, or you'll blow your budget and your time. But in any event, you need to manage those things, and it a team needs to manage them together. And when you start out, of course, you're a member of the team, you're probably doing specific tasks, you you know the other people in the team, they help you, you help them, you give them a uh, you know, a brilliant idea over lunch, and uh and that's what binds you. And and when you get into a problem on a team, uh, you know, maybe you're behind schedule and you got to work weekends, uh, the team works, pulls together, you you build trust, you understand the other people, and uh and and if a team works together, uh you're gonna you're gonna get to the end zone. Um and then as your career progresses, you move up the chain until you're leading a team. You need to understand the people, uh, and you need to put the square peg in the square hole uh and make the team respect each other, understand their strengths and weaknesses, play on their strengths, don't hammer them for their weakness. If they have a weakness, you get somebody else on the team to cover that weakness. That's how the team is knit together. And uh and if you have good morale, uh decent people, and and honest leadership and and and uh trust that binds you, uh, that's what makes you know projects uh sing. It's it's not, I mean, to some degree, it's the you know the computer programs or the IT programs you have and the and the technology you use that uh improves on uh quantity and and quality and and uh productivity, but fundamentally, in the when you're designing, and we we designed projects, we didn't build them, the engineers design them, uh come up with a set of plans and specifications, hand it over to a contractor, and the contractor bills it. So uh uh uh the the team that puts that uh those set of construction documents together, you know, has to work seamlessly. Because let's say, you know, our bread and butter was wastewater treatment. Plants. So you need environmental engineers to know how a wastewater treatment plant works. But to run a wastewater treatment plant, you need electrical engineers because you have a lot of pumps. You need structural engineers because you have to build a lot of tanks and structures. You need

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SPEAKER_02 24:06

estimators. So you need all these people to work as a team. And making that work, if you make that work, you will be successful.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Well, I know you you grew. Tetra tech resolves revenue from 20 million to 40 million. So talk about the important leadership principles that were necessary to make that growth happen.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

Well, that

(Cont.) Engineering a Legacy: Rick Moore's Journey from Vietnam to Water Solutions

SPEAKER_02 24:43

happened uh from the late 1990s to the late 2000s, right about up until the uh uh the the crash in 2008. And there were a couple things that were going on at that time. Probably the most significant was the the technology, the computer-aided technology, so that uh an engineer in the 1980s, for instance, would sketch out stuff sometimes in in pencil, run equations uh uh by hand, sometimes have some simple computer models, and then would have to deal with a you know somebody to to type the the material, uh hand the drawings to a draftsman who would sit with a pencil on a big board and and sketch the drawing out. Uh and with the computer-aided drafting that came along, an engineer now could sit at a computer terminal, and they didn't need administrative support, they needed IT support to make sure that the the programs ran properly, uh, but they didn't need a drafts person. They could do it all uh right on the screen in front of them. So if you wanted to design, you know, let's say a tank, uh you could an engineer could do that all by themselves. And uh and and and then produce and and the the biggest power of that, and we saw this once in the beginning of this, where the head of our IT, uh the head of our drafting department took it upon himself to understand and learn this program, these computer-aided drafting programs. And we had a client come in and look at a set of drawings that we had, you know, we had produced. There might have been 30 drawings. These are big 24 by 36 inch drawings, and went all through each one of them. And he'd come to a point where he'd say, gee, you know, I'm not sure I like this. And so the engineer would jot down, well, actually, the the the drawings were up on a screen. They weren't paper drawings, they're up on a screen. And the client would say, Geez, I'd like, you know, this change a little bit. And the engineer would change it while they were watching, instead of, you know, sending it back to a draftsman and getting it back in a week, right while the client was watching. Not only that, but if that drawing came up, or that piece of equipment or that whatever it was came up in 15 of the 30 drawings, you hit a button and that change was made in all 15 drawings, rather than having a draftsman go through each one of the drawings and make that change with the possibility of errors and yada yada yada. And when it was all over, he came into my office with the client, and the client was amazed at how this happened. And uh, and he said, Well, when can I get a uh a new set of drawings, an updated set of drawings? And Pat Barrett was the guy's name. He said, Well, you talk to Rick for a little bit and I'll go get you the set. And in 20 minutes, he came back with a brand new set. And this all happened within like a couple hours, which would have taken two weeks uh under normal circumstances. So my point is that productivity, that increase in in revenue from 20 to 40 million didn't take twice as many people. It took about 60 percent. In other words, our revenue doubled, but our staff headcount only went up by about 60 percent because of that um efficiency that came with the uh with the computer programs. You're seeing the same thing today with IT, uh with AI. Uh uh, you know, I get stuff now with people, and you can tell it's done AI. There's maybe not anything wrong with it, but it it's done so more much more quickly and and uh and efficiency. Now, you say, well, uh that's great, but how did you go from 20 to 40 million? You went from 20 to 40 million because you showed your clients that you were more efficient. And that client who saw what I was just describing, he never ever uh for the next 10 years went to any other engineer. He always came to us. We didn't have to squibble about price, we didn't have to write proposals, he just came in and said, I want you to do this, do it. And he trusted us and we did it. And you know, you get a few clients like that which have a lot of work, and that's how you grow.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Well, you've worked in government, the military, private industry, and academia. So tell us what uh experience was the most challenging, and what did it teach you that you still use today?

SPEAKER_02 30:02

Well, the first company I worked for was uh a company called Medcaffineti. Uh in the 70s, they were the premier environmental engineering company in the country. There were probably two or three companies, they were in that two or three mix. And they their opinion was that you could only work for public clients. You couldn't work for private clients because the dynamics were so much different. And when when I left them, uh, and I probably never would, but they moved their office, and I I just couldn't abide by that, but I left them, they were a wonderful, wonderful company. I went with a very small company. We started, we only had a couple people and and and grew. Uh and and I was of the opinion that you could work for both public and private clients. But they are very, you know, very different uh cultures, very different, you know, structures. In a public client, it's all by the book. You have to compete, open, you have to write proposals, give interviews, you know, get selected, and then go through the um, you know, the the arduous task of uh uh writing up contracts and and schedules and all the bureaucratic stuff. But the money tends to be more reliable once you get a project. You know, you you know that the uh you know the state of Massachusetts or the state of Illinois or the city of Chicago is probably gonna pay you. Uh and in in in the uh public sector, uh you know, uh the three things I mentioned before, schedule, budget and quality. In the public sector, they they are ranked budget, and then schedule and quality are second. But the primary thing is budget, because no public employee wants to go back to his um board of directors and say, listen, I I need a change order for this engineer because they need more money. Uh so you you you you're very focused on the the budget part uh in the uh in the public sector. In the private sector, it's very different. It's all about relation relationships. If you get a public client like the one I was, I mean, a private client, a developer, say, or an industry, uh, and you develop a relationship with them, uh, like the one I described. We had one, uh, a very very, very good one with you, you'll recognize the company Bose, uh, the Bose speakers. Well, the Bose headquarters was in the same town that our office was in, and we got to know them, and we did a lot of, and and I got to know the chief of the engineering uh department, and we just got and and in the private sector, they don't have to worry about you know public laws and competition. They can just pick anybody they want, they negotiate any cost they want. Uh, and in addition, and cost is generally not the driving uh factor. In the private sector, the driving factor is schedule. Uh, because most developers or even industry, they need to beat the clock. They need to be the first one in the ground. So uh it's a very different kind of uh dynamic uh where schedule is the holy grail. Uh if if you can meet the schedule, you know, they'll pay you 50% more just to meet the schedule. The problem with the private sector is they're not as reliable in terms of payment uh as the public sector. The public sector may take you a while to get paid because of the bureaucracy, uh, and that's a problem, but it's a better problem than a private developer or a private industry that just doesn't pay you uh because of some uh uh unpleasant situation. But the the point I'm making is I believe uh uh that you know some people like to just be in one or the other. I believe you can be in both as long as you understand the ground rules in in both cases. Uh and that's the um, and and by the way, I uh I was never in a situation where I felt that there was you know uh bribery or you know that kind of shenanigans, corruption involved. Um clearly public officials like some consultants more than others, but in my experience, it was generally speaking a fair and above-board competition. Uh and in the private sector, um there can be a lot more shenanigans, uh, but you the the profits are better in the in the private sector. And if you pick good clients like Bose Corporation, you know, you know, the gold standard in the in the industry, um you're you're you're gonna work you're gonna do very well and probably be more profitable uh than in the in the public sector. To me, the main benefit of working both sides is that recessions and economic you know um ups and downs hit different sectors differently. So that when that might be a uh uh uh a recession in the private sector, we we had Marriott Corporation as a client uh back in the 80s. We were doing, I don't know, 12 or 13 Marriottes in New England all at once in various uh stages of development. And uh when the Massachusetts miracle exploded in like 1989, 1990, Marriott called me up one day and said, put down your pencils, stop work. Uh and and that that was that was a blow. The public sector, they just kept on chugging along. And then when you have a uh a booming economy, you don't have to rely so much, you don't have to put so much effort into getting public work because the pipeline on the private side is is flush and you can you can uh it's a gravy train. Uh so that's another advantage of working public and private. Um now there's uh the the second part of that is international work. And uh I spent uh a couple of years um in India, not full time, but uh I paid taxes in India for a couple of years, so I spent a lot of time there. And we were building uh sewage treatment plants and um and sewers and drains and and flood control uh facilities uh uh working on the public sector side for cities, uh mostly for cities. And uh and the international work is very, very different than the domestic work uh for two reasons. TetraTech, we were a wholly owned subsidiary of TetraTech, and their their take on international work was the only international work you could you should do is international work that was funded by like the USAID, which unfortunately no longer exists, uh, or the World Bank, some you know, uh world or US, so you were paid in US dollars. You weren't a client to a city in India uh that could, you know, ball you up and not not pay you for one reason or another. Um I was under the impression because they wanted to close down the India office, I said, no, let me give it a shot. And we did build the India office uh up uh to over 200 people, uh, but we had a very, very difficult time on the business side, uh, in terms of corruption, uh, and in terms of getting paid. And so, you know, you were sort of hit on both ends. And the on the front end, everybody wanted to you know uh to get paid off to get to get a project. Uh, and that was done in various different ways uh that you you did to protect yourself legally, but you know, if it you know quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And so that was on the front end, and then the back end, the bureaucracy always tied up your payments. So sometimes it would take years because the bureaucracy just couldn't regurgitate that last check. And uh it was very, very frustrating. The work was wonderful, the people were wonderful, we got a lot done, but the business side of it was very, very, very um challenging. Uh, I think that's all getting better now, but um this was, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, it was it was still a struggle.

SPEAKER_01 40:01

Well, after spending 40 years working in engineering and project management, what do you feel like young engineers and infrastructure professionals need to understand about the business?

SPEAKER_02 40:15

Well in in terms of leadership, um you you can't go too too fast. Um one of my favorite uh expressions is you don't want to peak too early. And what I mean by that is in the engineering profession, you generally you know start out as a as an engineer doing tasks, you become a project engineer, you get your license, a professional engineering license, just like a a doctor or a lawyer has a license, so you can't practice legally without a license. And then you become a project manager, and the the project manager is the focus of any consulting engineering business, because that project manager has to do everything. They have to get the project, you know, compete in in the open marketplace, get the project, they have to do the project, they have to collect the money uh and do all those things, you know, uh schedule, budget, quality. They have to the the project manager is uh what what drives an engineering company. And in order to become a good project manager, you need to spend some time in the trenches. You can't go too fast, or when you get there, you won't have the tools to understand how all those pieces uh fit together, both within the company, because you have to deal with you know human resources, you have to deal with IT, you have to deal with the financial people. Um, and and all those people it takes time to build relationships with the people in those different departments and and to work together. And everybody wants to go really fast. I gave a talk uh about this uh at Lafayette College to the engineers uh undergraduates there, where I I went to Lafayette, and one of the one of the questions was uh how do I become a vice president? Uh and it was like, you know, you you you you you do you pay your dues uh in the trenches, and so when you do become a vice president, you don't screw it up. Um and uh from a leadership point of view, uh I kind of like to look at it from two different points of view: the top-down leadership and the bottom-up leadership. When I went to Vietnam, I was 23 years old. I had a platoon of 30 people I had to lead, and I didn't know, you know, the and I wasn't even in the army my first year. I was in a engineering school. It was I was like a professor at an engineering school, so I had no real uh experience doing that. And so I really had no choice but to lead from the bottom up. And one of the other platoons was led by a chief warrant officer, had like 25 years experience. He he ran the motor pool. And he knew what, he had been around the block many, many, many times. So in the morning, all he did was tell the platoon sergeant what he thought needed to be done that day, and most of the time he was right, and then he went back and he did whatever he did. I, on the other hand, had no clue what was going to happen at 10 o'clock when it was six o'clock in the morning. So I had to, you know, hand in hand go with all the troops, hammer nails, you know, get down and dirty, if you will, and try to understand and make decisions, uh, bad decisions, but fix them as I went. That, you know, that's both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. As you get older and more experienced, like that Warren officer, you can do more of a top-down approach. The the the but as I said, there's a risk in both of those approaches. The risk in the bottom-up approach is that you get so caught up in the weeds of the detail that you lose sight of the the big picture. And and uh I I had that happen to me. We were building a water tank, and I wanted to be so involved and show the troops that I was, you know, I could do everything they could do and do it better. And we were building the putting the bottom of the tank together up on a on a tower, and I was actually screwing some of the bolts in. And after about 20 minutes, I realized that in order to make the tank watertight, you had to put a rubber gasket between the metal plates, which I had neglected to do. I was in such a rush to get it done. So we had to take the bolts out and redo it. That's the risk of getting too close. But the risk of the top-down, which you naturally do as you know, you get older and you get farther away from the the um everyday tasks and everyday uh stuff, is that you lose track of the people and uh and the morale. Let's put it that way. Morale and trust are the things that glue a team together. And the only The only way to maintain morale and trust is to even when you're the president of the company, you know, I used to be, you know, 50% billable even as president of the company. And as the expression goes, you know, you you um you lead by walking around, and you know, you walk around the office, you you look at somebody's computer screen, and you say, you know, what are you doing? And and she'll tell you, and you say, Well, have you tried this, or uh she'll say, geez, I, you know, I and I don't know exactly what to do here. And you say, Well, you know, I did that, you know, five years ago, you might try this. And that's the kind of you that blends the the bottom and the bottom up and the top down. You have to have some blending of the two. You can't do all of one or all of the other.

SPEAKER_01 46:39

Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

SPEAKER_02 46:45

Well, I um uh I'm right now on Cape Cod, and uh Cape Cod has water quality problems. They've always had water quality problems, and over the last 20 years, the big problem has been in the uh on the beaches and the salt water estuaries where you know people come to Cape Cod because they like to go to the beaches and swim in the ocean. It has been polluted by septic systems and a variety of other things. And so over the past 20 years, they've focused a lot on trying to uh uh maintain and improve the water quality in the in the saltwater environment around the Cape. But in the last five years, there are hundreds, literally well, thousands of small ponds on Cape Cod, freshwater ponds. Cape Cod's are basically a big sandbar. And when the glaciers left, they left these huge big blocks of ice. And when the blocks of ice melted, they basically created a hole that filled up with groundwater and became a pond. And these ponds now, I mean, they've always had some problems, but now uh two two things are happening. One is the climate's getting warmer, uh, which doesn't help. And secondly, people are starting to measure the bacteria in the ponds. And these bacteria have been there for thousands of years, but uh because now people are measuring them, certain bacteria when they die give off toxins, which can be irritating to humans and particularly dogs or or or small, small children. So uh I'm actually on the um Barnesable Pond Coalition Technical Advisory Board uh helping them trying to come up with solutions to uh to the freshwater pond problem on Cape Cod. And it's not only on Cape Cod, it's it's really all over the Northeast and you know out into the Midwest. Uh and and also in Florida, you know, particularly in Florida where you have such hot uh high temperatures year-round. So that's my current uh you know, sort of technical focus. And I'm on a board and I I do some other nonprofit stuff. Uh I I have set up uh one of the things I I was most proud of, actually, um when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts before he was a senator and ran for president. Uh and when he was governor, uh he set up um what they called the Goddard Council. Uh Goddard was a you know famous early space uh rocket engineer, and the Goddard Council uh mission was to promote STEM education. STEM is science, technology, engineering, and math. And I was the uh appointed as the engineering representative to the Goddard Council. So I worked with a lot of um uh educators and and other uh people uh in business to try to promote uh young people uh to get involved in the middle school, grammar school, middle school, to get involved in science, technology, engineering, and math curriculums so that they would uh have a fighting chance uh to be accepted at a uh at a college in one of those disciplines. And we used to bring two or three teachers every summer in as essentially interns. And these were math and science teachers, and they uh were shadowed, uh they shadowed uh an engineer in the company uh for you know July and August to try to understand what uh an engineering company did, and then they could bring that knowledge back into the classroom. And you know, if they were in middle school and had, you know, they could touch 90 kids with this information. So we thought that was a good way to to leverage um the um the effort to get STEM uh better understood at the uh grammar at the middle school and high school level.

SPEAKER_01 51:30

Well, you have a website. Uh I can listen to keep it keep up with everything that you're up to and gonna be up to.

SPEAKER_02 51:38

I have a the company I started uh, I'm winding it down, but it's still active. It's a um a service disabled veteran-owned business, and it's called uh strangely enough, more engineering. And the website is www.more mo-o-r-e dot engineering. And there you can uh you can see what we're we're we're doing. And there's also some stuff about my time in India on there, which you might find interesting.

SPEAKER_01 52:15

All right, we'll close us out with some final thoughts, maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on. Any final thoughts you have for the listeners?

SPEAKER_02 52:25

Uh I'm just looking at my notes. I think we're uh I I think I got you had good questions. I I think uh I think I covered what I wanted to do. I I just leave you. You know, they say you have to say it, say it again, and then say it a third time. You know, get out of your comfort zone and learn how to work with teams so that someday you can lead them.

SPEAKER_01 52:54

All right, ladies and gentlemen, moreengineering.com to keep up with everything that Rick's up to. Go pick up those three books that he has published, also off of Amazon. Follow rate review, share this episode to as many people as possible, especially all the aspiring infrastructure professionals and engineers out there. Also, to keep up with all things living the dream, please visit www.curveball337.com. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Rick, once again, thank you for your service and thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Thank you. Good questions. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 53:34

For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.curveball337.com. Until next time, keep living the dream.