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

But you really have to keep track of the volume.

Is it truly a special case or has it become actually the way that work gets done?

So there's a quote that we open the book with that I think captured it

you know, as well better than we could, which is it was from a student we had in class a couple of years ago.

And I was talking about firefighting and this cycle.

And he said, you know, I know my organization's in trouble when I show up Monday morning.

I make a list of all the important things I want to do this week.

I work my ass off all week.

I get back to my office right afternoon and I look at my list and I got nothing done.

And if that sounds familiar to you, which it does to many of the students in our audience, then chances are you've got some firefighting going on in your organization.

And I think the thing that's really tricky about it is

You know, several generations of managers have been trained to think that that's their job.

We talk pretty extensively in the book about the Broad Institute, which is one of our lead users.

And, you know, the star of our story, Sheila Dodge, who has grown in to be one of the most successful leaders we've come across, you know, she thought that the chaos that she experienced from 7 a.m.

to 7 p.m.

every day, she thought that was her job and she was very good at it.

And when I first met Don at Harley, Harley was incredibly good at taking troubled projects and getting them done at the last minute.

But underneath all that chaos, they were hiding a whole new level of performance that once they created a little bit more of a fireproof system, things really got a lot better.

Yeah, and what I would add to that is, again, Dan, as a former CEO, you know this better than us, but you are expected to do big things and there are many big things that you need to do.

But I think what's going on here is there is an implicit equation that because I'm a leader with a big span of responsibility, I always need to do big things and those big things always have the highest leverage.

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