Dan Hesse

speaker

1,215 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 11 Apr

Dan Hesse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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The Mentors Radio Show · 469. Good Leaders Get Their Hands Dirty, with Guest Mentors Nelson Repenning and Don Keiffer · 21 Mar 2026 podcast

We're discussing how AI might alter dynamic work design with Nelson Repenning and Don Kiefer.

the subject of ai is ai different i mean i sitting on boards there's all this pressure to completely redesign everything workflow jobs we need to lean into ai faster and heavier than our competitors or we're going to be left in the dust what's your take on ai's impact on all this and do you think ai actually might redesign work by itself

So coming back to something we discussed in the last segment, you talked about the importance of leaders getting their hands dirty, which implies that leaders kind of understand the business to get their hands dirty.

When I started my career, I remember it was at AT&T.

I was working in product management where I worked with Bell Labs on designing new products for customers.

Then I went out into field sales and worked with customers.

Then I went into network engineering where I learned how to engineer these new features and capabilities into the network.

Then I went into operations where I installed and maintained them.

And I remember probably the biggest learning experience I ever had, even with all that, was the strike of 1986 where I had 2,000 technicians who worked for me go out on strike.

So management had to do the frontline work.

So I spent a whole week taking trouble tickets.

The next week, I engineered circuits.

The next week, I installed them.

The next week, I maintained them.

So, you know, you have, you actually, and the good news is then I could re-engineered the work, which was primarily around the incentive systems and the main priorities.

That's what was driving kind of the wrong behavior.

You really understood how work got done.

I just recently saw a situation where the CEO kept putting in new rate plans, you know, in the telecom business without taking out any of the others.

So work got so much more complicated.

It gummed up the IT systems, it gummed up training,

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