Don Kiefer

speaker

146 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 21 Mar

Don Kiefer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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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

Thanks, Dan.

And as far as being complimentary,

uh nelson was a cool calm collected thoughtful mit professor quite a bit younger than me and i was the uh i don't know the

very excitable, fought my way up from the shop floor to running a big engine program.

Everything was self-taught.

So I thought everything that I had learned was really exciting.

And so I'm telling Nelson all this stuff we were doing.

We were both problem solvers and both trying to make the world a better place at work.

So we hit it off right away.

But I would tell him something I'd done really exciting.

And one was which invented the stage gate process through

doing work at Harley.

said don why don't you read a book once in a while the stage gate process was invented by the automotive industry like 30 years ago and uh so another time i i told him about this one thing i was doing i was working with difficult people and he goes well i want to know more about this i'm going like well what's the big deal i just you know help this guy and whatever and he says well don there's not a lot of literature on that particular thing but what literature there is says you should do absolutely the opposite of what you've done and you've got stellar results so i'd like to learn more about this

Luckily, I was smart enough to say, this guy can be helpful to me because I was like a loose cannon, just like doing all kinds of stuff.

But this helped me aim the cannon better, better places.

And that's kind of the relationship we've had for 30 years.

Well, we both have a different focus.

I tend to be mostly focused in the field.

And Nelson is primarily focused on teaching and academic.

But we have about a 24% crossover.

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