There's Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work

The chaos of everyday business forces people into an exhausting, ineffective, seemingly never-ending cycle of work-arounds, firefighting, and Whac-a-Mole. The irritatingly urgent crowds out the lastingly important.

And there is: the game-changing discipline of dynamic work design improves productivity, reduces costs, and increases efficiency, ensuring that all parts of a company can work in concert. It has been used in organizations around the world to close the gap between results promised and results delivered.

The five principles of dynamic work design--solve the right problem, structure for discovery, connect the human chain, regulate the flow, visualize the work--have yielded breakthrough results in settings ranging from biotech labs and hospitals to oil refineries, homeless shelters, and casinos.

Large-scale change initiatives, reorganizations, and productivity programs rarely improve productivity, are expensive, and always add a lot of busy work. There's Got to Be a Better Way is an antidote, enabling you to rethink basic beliefs about your tasks, changing the way you see and think about the flow of work in your organization, and allowing you to redesign your work to boost productivity and profit.

Nelson P. Repenning is the School of Management Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is currently the director of MIT's Leadership Center and was recently recognized by Poets & Quants as one of the world's top executive MBA instructors. His scholarly work has appeared in Management Science, Organization Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, and Research in Organizational Behavior.

Donald C. Kieffer is a senior lecturer in operations management at MIT Sloan and founder of ShiftGear Work Design. He is an operations executive who started his career after high school running metal cutting machines in factories. Later, during his fifteen-year tenure at Harley-Davidson, he led the Twin Cam engine development project, was a general manager of Harley's engine manufacturing, and served as vice president of operational excellence for the company.