Fireside Chats: Behind The Build

About Fireside Chats: Behind The Build

Explore what truly creates workplace happiness, builds a better culture, and drives greater engagement for the entire workforce — from the suits in the C-suite to team members on the frontlines. Get real-world insights and practical strategies to recognize, retain, elevate, and empower teams. From engaging interviews with thought leaders in our Voices web series to step-by-step how-tos, MustardHub helps you operationalize great culture and design the workplace of tomorrow... today. MustardHub Voices: Behind The Build addresses these hot topics and more with business leaders, entrepreneurs, HR professionals, consultants, coaches, researchers, and other brilliant minds committed to building, engaging, and elevating culture-driven, high-performing teams.

Publisher

MustardHub

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

17 Jun 2025

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

88 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Oct 2026

   Randy Mely on the One Question to Ask Before You Send Any People Analytics Request

   In this episode of Leading Indicators, Curtis Forbes sits down with Randy Mely, an independent people analytics consultant and ICF-credentialed coach based in London, for a conversation about why most analytics teams perform exactly as designed and still leave the manager's real question unanswered. Randy spent 15 years in people analytics, much of it inside Philip Morris International, HSBC, and Morgan Stanley, and he describes the pattern in one example. A manager worries that the sales team is on shaky ground. By the time that worry has passed through an HR business partner, it has become a request for attrition reporting by department, and the analytics team delivers a polished dashboard that answers the request and misses the decision. His fix is a single question asked before any request is sent: if the number comes back at X, what will I do, and if it comes back at Y, what will I do instead. The conversation covers why the value of an analytics function is set by the people it serves, and why Randy would score a team on how many decisions it changed in a quarter instead of how many reports it delivered on time. Randy also tells the story of working inside a company that eliminated its people analytics function. Other topics include why three systems can report three different headcounts without anyone lying, why a low survey response rate is still a data point, and why people optimize for whatever they know is being measured, with a snake bounty story as the cautionary tale. He closes with why the unicorn analytics job spec screens out the people a company actually needs, and why the skills that endure as AI makes execution cheap are the ones that decide whether a question is worth answering. About the Guest Randy Mely's view is that most analytics teams perform exactly as designed, for organizations that never asked them to do anything but report. He's spent 25 years in HR and 15 in People Analytics, most of it inside Philip Morris International, HSBC and Morgan Stanley, watching that pattern from the inside. He's independent now, based in London, part consultant and part ICF-credentialed coach, and his whole argument is that somebody has to own a decision before the analysis starts. LinkedIn named him a Top Voice in data visualization, which he'll tell you mostly means he has strong feelings about pie charts.

2. 

   7 Oct 2026

   David Forry on Why AI Adoption Rates Measure Activity, Not Outcomes

   In this episode of Leading Indicators, Curtis Forbes sits down with David Forry, Senior Vice President and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, for a conversation about the question that should follow every AI adoption number: what does that actually tell us? David reads roughly 3,000 award submissions a year, each of which has to list measurable benefits, so he sees what separates AI programs that produce results from programs that produce dashboards. His read is that most organizations are measuring the part that is easiest to count. Adoption is a signal, not an outcome, and the pilots that skipped the link to business outcomes are the ones that struggled to get funded a second time. The conversation covers why a skill listed on a profile is a hypothesis until a manager, an assessment, or a simulation confirms it, and why two employees who look identical in the system can be nowhere near equally ready for change. David shares the story of a manufacturing company that ran three major change initiatives in one year and managed only one of them from HR, and a survey result that could not say whether employees distrusted the CEO or their own manager. He also makes the case that governance should work like a fence in a yard, giving people the confidence to move freely inside it, and he shares what he is tired of seeing on the HR Tech floor this year. About the Guest David Forry is Senior Vice President and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, where he has spent nearly a decade helping organizations navigate workforce transformation. With more than 15 years in Human Capital Management, David works with HR and business leaders to turn workforce data, research and emerging practices into better business decisions. His current research focuses heavily on AI transformation, workforce intelligence, skills, HR operating models and the changing relationship between people and technology. He also leads Brandon Hall Group's Excellence Councils, bringing corporate practitioners together to co-create research based on the challenges they are solving inside their organizations. David is a frequent speaker and advisor to senior executives and brings a practical perspective to what is changing in the workplace, what is actually working and where organizations are still struggling to turn strategy into measurable outcomes.

3. 

   18 Sept 2026

   Randy Fisher on the One Question That Surfaces Every Hidden Problem in a Stalled Project

   In this episode of MustardHub Voices: Behind the Build, Curtis Forbes sits down with Randy Fisher, executive coach and career strategist, for a conversation about the thing most change initiatives are missing before they ever get to strategy: an honest conversation with the people who have to live through it. Randy's path ran from business journalism into a nonprofit career-transition role, where a director once pulled him aside and told him he needed to learn to listen with more than his ears. That sent him into a counseling certificate program, where he picked up the insight that has shaped his entire practice since: most people, most of the time, are afraid of looking bad, of new technology, of a change nobody has explained to them, and fear is what quietly sabotages every initiative that fails. The conversation covers why a stalled project is almost never a strategy problem in disguise but a human one, why the people with the clearest read on what's actually broken are often the ones least likely to speak up in a meeting, and why Randy builds buy-in the way Malcolm Gladwell describes a tipping point: find the one person already excited, build a small circle around them, and let momentum do the rest. Randy also makes the case for what leaders owe their teams in a moment where nobody, including the leaders themselves, actually knows where AI and constant change are headed: not false certainty, but honesty about the business reality, realistic goals instead of impossible ones, and enough safety that people will actually tell you the truth about what isn't working.

Who has been a guest on Fireside Chats: Behind The Build

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Jerry Akers
• Kurt Schmidt
• Kyle Lagunas
• Satish Kumar
• Mary Stieber Reinout

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 32 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

64

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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