With sadness we’ve learned of the passing of one of our founders, Chuck Kepner. In the 1950’s, Dr. Charles Kepner and Dr. Benjamin Tregoe conducted groundbreaking research together forming the foundational base that has allowed our company, Kepner-Tregoe, to grow and flourish. We thank Chuck for his contribution and wish his family well in this very difficult time.
We thought we’d celebrate Chuck’s life with a few words about their partnership from Ben that he mentioned in an interview some years ago.
Benjamin B. Tregoe Interview conducted 2005
” We set up this company in the back end of my garage in Pacific Palisades, California. Chuck and I put in $250 dollars each and our car. That was the capitalization of the company.
In deciding what we were going to do with what we’ve learned from our research, an obvious choice for us was to help others. If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, if you teach a man to fish you feed him for life. That was a major consideration and became one of our basic beliefs. We knew these ideas were valuable and we would impart them to other people.
Chuck and I came to the conclusion that if we could make people more consciously aware of the process they were using, and of a good decision process, we could improve their performance and we could enable them to pass it on to someone else.
We started to identify the sequence of events to successfully analyze when a system is going wrong. We wanted to know: what kind of information do you need to come to a conclusion as to why your car doesn’t run or why this production line is broken? “
