Lee Cage Jr., Director of Enterprise Transformation, How HR Can Drive the Business Forward

Most CEOs have the same private complaint about HR: it shows up with workshops when the business asked for revenue. The function that owns the single largest line item on the P&L is still, in a lot of rooms, treated as overhead. That gap is not an HR problem. It is a translation problem.

Lee Cage Jr. has spent eighteen years in Army HR and now leads enterprise transformation, strategy, and technology at BDO USA, where he has guided nonprofits, healthcare systems, and large automotive organizations through the change. He came to HR wanting to be a cultural anthropologist, and he still works that way: studying how people actually behave at work, then rebuilding the systems around what he finds.

We're building Human Cloud so the same reframe holds on the buying side, so business teams can go get an outcome without first converting it into a full-time headcount.

In this episode, Lee Cage Jr. shares:

• Why an HR leader who cannot name the company's KPIs has already lost the argument, and what changes the moment they can
• The 1 FTE trap: how budgeting only in whole headcount makes organizations miss the 0.25 and 0.5 people who would outperform
• Why he believes everybody is already an independent contractor, and what at-will employment really means for how you structure work
• Lock and shift is not transformation: if the business process survives the migration unchanged, nothing was transformed
• Why laying off every junior to fund AI quietly guarantees you will have no competent leaders in a decade

Lee Cage Jr. is Director of Enterprise Transformation, Strategy & Technology at BDO USA and an eighteen-year Army HR leader, with degrees from Lipscomb and Emory, an incoming PhD in leadership and strategic innovation, and a podcast of his own called Fifteen Minutes With.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.