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

We are often tagged as manufacturing guys, you know, because occasionally we will talk about pull or, you know, I've learned this the hard way.

Don't ever use a single Toyota analogy because you'll never be able to escape that for the rest of the talk.

You know, I think modern manufacturing environments and modern supply chains are in many cases quite dynamic, and they have particularly been forced to be through COVID.

And, you know, I've just learned to

adapt pretty quickly in contrast there has been almost no innovation on the white collar or knowledge work side in work design i think the agile software development method is probably the one serious exception um and so i think there's sort of good news and bad news there which is in many cases a lot of knowledge work is executed quite poorly in many cases the good news though is

boy, the upside when you get it right can be quite substantial.

And so throughout the book and our work together, we focus 95 plus percent on knowledge-oriented work.

And there are often some very, very big wins.

And if you do the kinds of analysis that when I was coming up with this in a factory, you might...

plot, you know, a part going through the factory and you'd find out that, you know, it was in the factory for 100 hours and we were touching it for 10 of those hours or something like that.

You know, when you do that for knowledge work, it's usually, you know, it takes 365 days to get something done and we're touching it for about three hours or something like that.

So there is a lot of white space and you can often make those processes work way better.

So we really see ourselves as

focus squarely on how to design the knowledge work aspects for most organizations.

And we will draw the occasional analogy from physical work, but now I think we've learned the hard way to do that sparingly.

yeah it's funny this is actually one of the interesting sort of i think uh constructive debates that don and i had over the course of the book writing because i think i had taken a strong position that you know workarounds were always trouble and i was like yeah i think that's a little unrealistic you know speaking to the ivory tower guy that um you know and i think you know the real answer is they're inevitable right and you occasionally need them and it's a really important source of flexibility for managers probably at all levels

the trick is though that you know it's kind of the dose makes the poison here in the sense that you know a little bit to get something done allows you a lot of flexibility but as don said if you're not careful workarounds become the process right you know and the reason is is that when you do a workaround chances are you've destabilized some other person's work and if you do it too much then suddenly everything is behind and then you need another work around and another work around and another work around and pretty soon workarounds are the process

Often when we are able to help the companies we work with make big gains, it is basically just helping them get rid of some of those workarounds that have been there so long that they become permanent.

And if you can get the work to flow and get rid of a little bit of that firefighting, things can often get better fast.

So don't take away from this that, you know, we should never do another workaround because I think, you know, they are necessary to adapt to a changing world.

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