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

And are we in touch with the ins and outs and the problems and the successes of the work?

And can we react to it in near real time?

Let me just add on to that.

I think people who work in the office have not a correct view of working in a factory and vice versa.

So people in the office will say, oh, we don't make widgets.

We are very creative and do all this kind of artistic kind of work, managing

people, but I mean, just imagine trying to get 800 people in a factory to do the same thing every two minutes and supply all the materials without making an error all day long with all the changes of people getting sick or changing.

So it's it's actually a quite dynamic environment.

But I think the key difference is

is that in the factory you can see the work when the assembly line stops everyone knows it but when a project has a problem we depend on the project manager to raise their hand and often we don't know it so the work in is way more complex it's harder to manage because it's hidden in email inboxes and project reports whereas in the factory it's it's more easy to see so i think that's the

It's much more that the ideas apply exactly, especially when you think about the fact that most work we talk about doing is human work, not machine work.

But just substitute machine for computer and you can get to the same place.

It's about human work.

But I think the work in a factory is visible and it's not as complex or as quickly changing as it is in the administrative, technical, managerial spaces.

Let me start on this one first, Nelson.

First of all, from a practical point of view, they're great because you can keep moving.

But from a long term view,

the place becomes workarounds and you lose control of the design and they just build up a whole bunch of problems, which throws you into this firefighting mode, which I'll let Nelson describe more of.

Yeah, the workaround is just the system speaking to you that whatever process you're using is not good enough for what's happening in the real world.

And so you can address it with a workaround, but if you don't then follow up and say, why didn't our system handle this as a normal occurrence?

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