There's Got to Be a Better Way

A groundbreaking method for clearing the organizational roadblocks that keep you from doing your job and delivering results

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.

There has to be a better way.

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.

"There's Got to be a Better Way indeed offers one. Blending expertise in system dynamics and behavioral science, along with decades of real-world practical experience, authors Nelson Repenning and Don Kieffer teamed up to write this groundbreaking new book. In it, they describe a compellingly actionable learning process for solving the most perplexing and persistent problems that plague every large organization. A must-read for leaders in any industry facing complexity, uncertainty, and pressure for results."

--Amy C. Edmondson, author of Right Kind of Wrong

"The most useful book on creating enduring organizational change I have ever read. This masterpiece shows why, when leaders try to change organizations for the better, they so often make things worse by focusing on fighting fires rather than fixing root causes. There's Got to Be a Better Way shows how savvy leaders can, instead, solve the right problems and build organizations that are consistently innovative, resilient, and reliable."

--Robert I. Sutton, New York Times bestselling author of The No Asshole Rule

"Using five fundamental principles, Nelson Repenning and Don Kieffer show how any organization can use their insightful methods to get stuff done faster, better, and with less effort. Repenning and Kieffer bring an engineer's perspective to business problems, giving organizations methods to diagnose and solve their own challenges in ways that uniquely work for them. At Fannie Mae, we applied these methods and improved our company immeasurably. Their teachings worked for us, and they can work for you."

--Timothy J. Mayopoulos, CEO, Fannie Mae
"There's Got to Be a Better Way emphasizes the power of dynamic leadership in the fast-paced world we live in. This is a great roadmap for learning how to identify core challenges, embrace flexibility, and experiment with new ideas to refine processes that have been holding your team back. Understanding how to swiftly identify the issue will allow leaders to pivot quickly--or boldly move in a different direction--without the fear of failure. Problem-solving in this way will ultimately drive long-term success and collaboration."--Joe Eastin, executive chairman and co-founder, ISN
"A masterful book that avoids the buzzwords common to the genre, providing actionable methods for removing frustration points and bottlenecks in order to make organizations more productive and more rewarding to work in. Repenning and Kieffer's methods can help reveal incorrect assumptions and blind spots that stop us from identifying and solving the right problems."
--Daniel Huttenlocher, Dean, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing
"If you want to solve the business problem you thought was unsolvable, look no further than this incisive new book, which presents a smart new way to unlock fast fixes to your once intractable challenges. It's a mindset makeover!"
--Suzy Welch, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Real-Life MBA
"In There's Got to Be a Better Way, Nelson Repenning and Donald Kieffer deliver a compelling roadmap for overcoming organizational inertia. With a wealth of real-world case studies and a proven framework, the authors introduce Dynamic Work Design--a practical, principle-driven approach that helps leaders unlock efficiency, drive sustainable change, and foster innovation. This book is essential reading for executives seeking to turn workplace frustration into high-impact results."
--Jim Anderson, CEO, Coherent
"Starting with the Human Genome Project, the Broad Institute has always embraced bold challenges to accelerate biomedicine. Ever since we learned from Nelson Repenning and Don Kieffer about Dynamic Work Design over thirteen years ago, it's been our foundation for continuous transformation of our Genomics Platform. When we applied it at the start of the COVID pandemic, it helped us deliver over 37 million tests, with turnaround under 24 hours and a cost far below commercial operations. It's been essential to so much of what we've done."
--Eric Lander, founding director, Broad Institute
"There is a better way! I've seen it, and I promise you it's possible. Overloaded, over regulated organizations are not only wildly inefficient--there are absolutely no fun to work in. In this eminently practical and deeply grounded book, Nelson Repenning and Don Kieffer draw on their decades of experience to show us all how we can build the kind of creative, extraordinarily productive workplaces most people only dream about."
--Rebecca Henderson, author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
"This book is a must-read for all leaders of organizations--big and small, private and non-profit, newly founded and well-established. It should be required of all students of organizational behavior. Building on decades of research and consulting, Repenning and Kieffer show how their dynamic work design approach can address long-standing organizational issues while also stimulating a reinforcing cycle of learning and innovation. Drawing on examples from an array of different organizations--industrial conglomerates, research laboratories, hospitals, and even shelters for at-risk women--There's Got To Be a Better Way illustrates how their disciplined approach actually works in practice and drives results. This is the very best management book I have read in years."
--Richard M. Locke, Incoming Dean, MIT Sloan School of Management
"A road map to eliminating inefficiencies and busting bureaucracies. Drawing on rigorous research and rich experience inside a wide range of workplaces, Nelson Repenning and Donald Kieffer reveal how to redesign work to do more in less time."
--Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
"Repenning and Kieffer are absolutely right: there's got to be a better way to work than what we're doing now! Fortunately, their theory of dynamic work design offers exactly the type of compelling alternative we've been so desperately searching for."--Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Deep Work

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.

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