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

This is my worry about AI.

In this well-intentioned zeal to automate everything, they're going to miss all the little workarounds and all those little pieces of duct tape and safety pins that people have added to make the work work.

I have a feeling a lot of organizations that are going too quickly are going to have to do a major retrenchment when they figure out that they can't make this stuff work.

Now, AI and robots are not the same thing.

And maybe the AI techniques will be able to learn their way around the workarounds.

I wouldn't bet my retirement funds on that.

But I do feel we're going to get some pullback.

And so the strategy I recommend, even though the book is not about AI, is exactly the one that we talk about for changing processes, which is find a problem in your organization, right?

A place where AI might be the solution to a business problem.

run a fast experiment to see whether you're headed in the right direction, work out all the kinks of getting it connected to the other systems, and then if it works, do more of it.

I think the incremental strategy for complex work is going to work much better than trying to replace everything at once.

My guess is we'll see a little bit of pullback and then the companies that are a little bit more sensible are going to suddenly really separate themselves from the field with this more incremental learning-based strategy.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

And I think number one, and then I think number two, back to our sort of occasionally getting your hands dirty, even when you have the corner office, it's the easiest thing in the world to repeat something that we said before, to lose sight of that because you're so busy and people tell you what you want to hear and your investor calls and so on and so forth.

And so I think making time to go to the shop floor, either literally or metaphorically to solve, you know, the occasional problem and get your hands dirty is just a really important part of the leadership toolkit for

that you can lose sight of.

And to give you a very extreme example, I did about 10 years worth of work in the energy industry.

And there are a couple of companies that remain nameless that people in the industry would say, well, that company is really a hedge fund that just happens to operate its assets and didn't really operate them very well.

And I think these companies can be enormously sophisticated in the financial part of the structure and then not know that they're violating basic safety practices in their oil refineries.

And that is not going to go well in the long run.

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