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 · last 12 months

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

Then you just build workaround upon workaround and you don't really strengthen the underlying system.

I'll put a number on it for you, Dan.

If 15% of your work life is like fighting fires and managing that kind of chaos, you're good because 85% is stable.

But when you get it reversed, you're in big trouble.

85% is chaos and 15% is standard, you're in trouble.

I'm not sure mentor is the right term.

I think he was more of a coach because

And to me, he became a guy I wanted to be like.

He would never give me the answer to a question.

Like for instance, one time he took me to one of his other client factories and he walked me through.

He wanted to see how skilled I was getting at walking through and observing.

And so we took a walk through and when we got out, I told him what I saw and I said,

Mr. Oba, what did I miss?

His answer was, what do you think you missed?

I mean, you just would never let me up for air on what it was.

But he demonstrated what he wanted you to learn.

So it's much more like an apprenticeship, but very old school, very tough guy.

But the thing that I loved about him was his skill at quickly seeing what was going on.

And so I knew I could never catch up with him in terms of understanding the manufacturing world as well as he did, even though I'd been in it my whole life.

But what I wanted to get from him in my short time with him was I wanted to understand his thinking.

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