Nelson Repenning

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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

For 10 plus years, we created and taught a class together in our executive MBA program.

And I think

that forced us to really work out our act.

And same thing with our executive classes.

You know, when there's a thorny issue with the client or, you know, Dom will come back with a real novel solution, we'll work on it.

And then I think, you know, the book was our HBO special, right?

You know, getting nine chapters together that made sense that we were both happy with, there was a lot of back and forth, but I'm totally convinced that the product was way better than anything I could have done on my own.

And I think, you know, it was, as you said in the beginning, it was a testament to the fact that we had a team with two very different perspectives and, you know, did the hard, often difficult work of putting those together and hopefully it worked out.

Yeah, I can start and then Dan can sort of give you the practical dimension.

But I think what it really came down here, as an organizational theorist that took me a while to really appreciate this, even though it was really staring me at the face, is almost all the tools that organizations use to guide their activity, and it's ones that you know way better than me, Dan, from your long career,

basically are implicitly presumed on the idea that we can predict the future with some degree of accuracy.

Right.

You know, so we make a capital plan and we have an H.R.

plan and, you know, we promise earnings to the markets and all that kind of stuff.

And then, as everybody knows, the world changes and then you're stuck halfway through the year of having it make it look like you're following that plan when in fact the world is different and it is no longer, you know, useful.

And I think it's that those workarounds and all those little changes that you make that create all sorts of trouble.

And so I think the gist of the book is if we accept the fact that the world is not perfectly predictable, we might design some of our core processes a little bit different.

We would make them more dynamic, more capable of changing.

And I think, you know, the very pleasant result of that is in many cases, if you add that perspective to the way organizations already do their work, you can often make things work a lot better.

And we've been able to generate some really nice success stories.

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