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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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 know, back in the 80s, when Detroit was really starting to feel the pain of their newly formidable Asian competitors,

You may recall that GM made this full court press into automation.

And I went back and looked up and GM spent at least $50 billion on creating robotic factories.

And that was 1980 dollars.

So it's about 150 billion by today's standards.

So a huge investment.

And if you go back and look at the details, the robot factories never match their human centered counterparts.

And there's all these funny stories of the robots painting each other and welding the car doors shut and so on and so forth.

It's just it has to be one of the bigger disasters and, you know, industrial history.

And I think what's so interesting about this example is, of course, if you fast forward to today, right, there's way more automation in factories than there was 45 years ago.

I looked up the stats recently.

You know, the number of hours per vehicle is about 50% what it was then.

And, you know, there's probably about 10 times as many robots as there were in 1980.

So GM wasn't wrong, right?

They had the right forecast of where it was going.

I think what they did incorrectly is their path from point A to point B was they tried to do it all at once, right?

We were going to place all the humans right away, all with robots.

And I think that most industrial systems are just too complicated for that.

And in part for a reason we already talked about, which is every process is a mix of what the initial design or design and then all those little workarounds that people have added to actually get the work done.

And when you try to replace that all at once, I think what you end up creating in many cases is just a big mess.

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