Don Hill

When faced with the lack-of-the knack, Don worked a lot of hours to prevent being mediocre.  It was hard on him and his family.  With a good education, good grades, good work ethic, and three meaningful internships, Don was failing at and becoming somewhat overwhelmed with his first job as an engineer at Battelle Memorial Institute.  He clearly did not have the ‘Knack” of Dilbert fame.  

One fall afternoon in 1984, he did have a five minute talk with a senior research scientist, Dr. Dean Williams.  Dr. Williams’s  advice was followed strictly.    Don radically improved even though he was essentially knackless, undisciplined, and disorganized and slow in the engineering field.  

Suddenly, Don was succeeding beyond his wildest dreams.  He was  “hungry”  for getting better at his job and had no idea his whole world, his life and his family life would all change for the better because of it. 

Biography:

Don Hill, Engineer, Pace Industries, M.S., Metallurgical Engineering, Ohio State University, 1983. Don solves a wide variety of problems complex and simple, often under pressure.  The problems solved by Don are typically related to manufacturing.  His education in Metallurgical Engineering from Michigan Technological University, and Ohio State University did not prepare him well to solve the problems or develop the processes he was going to encounter.   His career was worked out at Battelle Memorial Institute, Winters Industries,  Hitchcock Industries,  ALCOA, and Pace Industries.   The biggest step gain in his abilities came from reading and immediately applying a portion of the contents of a little easy read book the Rational Manager, by Kepner and Tregoe.   Later he added DOE by Shin Taguchi, to speed up his investigations and improvements.  For conversations starters:  Don is married to Mary, they have eight grown children.  All eight of them have kept their Catholic faith.  Two of them are religious sisters.  There are twenty six grandchildren from six rock solid marriages.   He shares his life openly on his family podcast Grandpa Hill’s True Stories.