Enquirer photo/Lauren Jackson
Ben and Melanie Eubanks share Ben’s recently-published book.

By Lauren Jackson lauren.jackson@hartselleenquirer.com

Ben Eubanks has always wanted to publish a book, and he has been interested in human resources since before he knew what it was called.
In December he was able to combine those interests to publish his first book.
Eubanks said his journey of publishing a book was not a typical one. “It’s strange; it did not start the way most people think of books starting,” he said. “I did not write the book and go looking for someone to publish it. The publisher actually reached out to me.”

Eubanks said his publisher discovered a video he had made with IBM about the future artificial intelligence and contacted him about writing a book. He spent the next eight months researching and writing the book. “This is a tool for business leaders to understand how technology is changing but also the key skills they need to be developing in themselves and their people to make sure they are future-proof,” Eubanks said.

Eubanks said he first became interested in the topic as he navigated his own business. “I run my own company, Lighthouse Research, and we work with the big technology vendors. I worked in HR for a long time, so I am interested in that angle of it – how we can hire the right people, how we can train them and hopefully keep them.

“When I started my own firm a couple of years ago, one of the things we focused on was the technology of that. For the larger companies, how are you handling 50,000 people applying every year? That’s what interested me in the topic. How can we leverage those tools, but again, how can we keep an environment to where it is still human at the core? We don’t need to get away from that.”

Although the book is primarily targeted toward larger employers, Eubanks said the skills the book talks about will continue to become more important to an even larger audience. “The ideas, especially the skills, are going to matter more and more as we see more automation in our personal lives and our working lives,” Eubanks said.

In addition to writing the book, Eubanks also continued to run his company and make time for his wife and their four children. He said it was difficult to manage all of the different obligations, but he eventually developed a process that worked best for him. “It is funny because I did not figure out until like the last month, when I got close to deadline, what the thing was for me. Between 4:30 and 6:30 in the morning was the ideal time because there were no distractions, no one else awake. I found out late. I probably could have finished it a month or two early if I had realized that early on,” Eubanks said.

After all the months of hard work, Eubanks said it wasn’t until some of his friends and work acquaintances began reading the book that it seemed real. “That has been the thing that is fun for me – seeing people I didn’t know, didn’t expect to read it, and having them kind of share that,” Eubanks said.

His wife Melanie said when the book was published, she was proud to see all of his hard work come to fruition. “I was extremely proud of him when he finally got it published,” she said. “It was a lot of work and a lot of time commitment for our family. We do have four children, and he travels a lot with his job too … I never thought I could say I was married to an author.
“I think this has finally helped me understand more of what he actually does,” she added. “Honestly it has taken several years to actually understand. We went on an HR cruise, and I got to sit in and listen to him speak, and it was refreshing because now I get it. I get what it is he does on the day-to-day basis.”
Eubank’s book can be found online at Amazon, Books-A-Million and Barnes and Noble.