Nelson Repenning

speaker

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

So I think it's a really critical skill because in part, it's the only antidote I know to the natural filtering that happens as the information goes up the ladder to the, you know, into the C-suite.

I think for me, it is as an instructor and an academic, it's really making a difference in the life of our students and helping them, you know, do their work better.

And I think the most practical version of that is there's probably no email I'd rather get than, hey, we talked about something in class on Friday or Saturday and I get the email on Tuesday and I tried it at my staff meeting.

Wow, it went better and people are more engaged and they enjoy their work more.

I think moving the ball forward in that way so people like their work better is definitely the thing that brings me to work each day.

Nelson?

I think for me, it's feeling like I have positive impact.

I'm earning my place on the planet and the privilege and the role that I have.

Yeah, so I think the reason it exists is every business school has a leadership center and they probably all need it.

I think for us, the reason we have one at MIT is that we tend to get as students, and I know you're an alum of our Augusta Institution, our students often are really stellar individual contributors.

And so I think our main goal is to take people who are very smart, technically savvy, strong individual contributors and prepare them for that inevitable moment in their careers where being the smartest guy or gal in the room isn't going to cut it.

anymore and that they're going to have to leverage the team and eventually their whole organization to be successful.

I think what really makes us different is there is in our peers and in many organizations, a very common approach to leadership, which I'm sure you've experienced many times and your listeners will, where we start off with the leadership model, you know, that we'll have nine to 12 attributes.

We'll assess you on that model and we'll find that you're

strong on some of those circles and a little weak on others.

And then we give you remedial training so that maybe you need to work on visioning or conflict management or whatever it might be.

And I have no issue with that, except that I think in many cases, particularly at the MBA level, that approach is a little bit built on a shaky foundation, which is if students don't know themselves and know their strengths and weaknesses and have that capacity for self-awareness,

then I think it's very hard for them to make progress on some of those higher order dimensions.

And so we really tried to build our students leadership capabilities from the ground up.

Who am I as a product of the history that I have gone through?

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