188. Why Apollo Was Blacklisted By First Brands, Credit Market Chaos Continued Plus Business Operations 101 (Part 1 of 2)

Oct 18, 2025

Don Kieffer, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and operations expert, discusses his work improving company performance through strategic system design. He shares his five-principle framework to drive operational excellence, emphasizing the importance of solving the right problems and observing real work on the shop floor. Kieffer warns against firefighting cultures that hinder capability growth and advocates for small, effective experiments over disruptive changes. He also explores the critical balance between automation and human systems in achieving sustainable business outcomes.

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ADVICE

Start Small, Fix One Process First

Start small: pick a small piece of a big problem and fix it before scaling the solution.
Avoid giant top-down initiatives that layer dysfunction because managers don't see daily work flow.

INSIGHT

Problems Often Hide As Premature Solutions

Write the problem down and treat it as an experiment to avoid jumping to familiar solutions.
Structured problem solving forces logical thinking and surfaces the true barriers to performance.

ANECDOTE

Hotel Front Desk Fix Boosted Restaurant Revenue

A hotel manager watched front desk behavior, set a clear target, and ran small experiments to drive restaurant traffic.
Employees created training videos and engagement rose, producing revenue that paid for the manager's MIT EMBA tuition.

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In this episode, we sit down with Don Kieffer, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of There’s Gotta Be a Better Way, to talk about what actually makes companies run well. Don has spent decades helping organizations, from Harley-Davidson factory floors to biotech labs, design better systems that unlock real performance. We break down the five-principle framework he developed with his co-author, Nelson Repenning, an MIT PhD, MIT Sloan professor, and leading expert in operations and systems thinking, for building operational excellence: solving the right problem, structuring for discovery, connecting the human chain, regulating for flow, and visualizing the work.

Through stories that range from front-desk hotel check-ins to a corrugated cardboard plant and even private equity fundraising pipelines, Don shows how tiny operational tweaks can deliver huge impact. We explore why firefighting cultures keep companies stuck in a “capability trap,” why automation without fixing the human system first is a mistake, and why the best private equity playbooks focus on execution, not spreadsheets. For founders, operators, and investors alike, this is a practical, no-fluff conversation about how businesses actually scale.

Before diving into operations, we also touch on recent rumblings in credit markets, continuing our discussion on the failed refinancing of First Brands and the liquidation of TriColor to bank fraud write-offs and how credit default swaps can amplify market stress. It’s a lively, two-part arc: first, the operational playbook; next, how top investors at Private Equity firms think about value creation inside portfolio companies.

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