Nelson Repenning

speaker

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

Nelson Repenning’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

So I can start and then Don can tell his part of the story.

But when I was a grad student, you know, there's really only two things in life that you want when you're a grad student, which is funding and data.

And the funding came from the National Science Foundation.

And at that time, they had a what was a very novel grant proposal, which is you had to have industry partners in order to get this particular grant.

So my senior colleague, John Sturman, I applied for it.

We got it.

And at a meeting, one of Don's Harley colleagues had

put his hand up and said they'd love to work with us.

And so I was starting to go collect data at Harley and talking to my contact there, who was the late Ron Hutchinson, who was then the director of quality for Harley.

And as we're walking down the hallway, he said, Oh, you really should talk to this Don Kiefer guy because he's doing some pretty impressive things in new product development.

And literally, Don was walking the other way and we ended up having lunch together.

He and I had a huge debate writing the book about what the name of the cafe was where we had our first lunch.

But we hit it off.

And I think even though we came at this from almost completely opposite directions, we shared a real interest in getting work done.

And, you know, that was 30 plus years ago.

And, you know, the book is sort of the next product in that collaboration.

Go ahead, Dan.

is that how you would say nelson yeah and you know i often use this analogy dan that i think putting together a framework like is in the book is a little bit like what i perceive to be a stand-up comedian in the sense that you know you write a few jokes you go to the monday night open night open mic night and you see which ones people laugh at and then as you get your act worked out maybe move to wednesday or thursday and then friday and then years later when it's all perfect you know you do your hbo or netflix special or whatever and

I think Don and I have been working on our act for 30 years.

And the way that tends to work is either we have a new piece we're writing together, then I think there's a lot of back and forth.

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