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 -- Nelson P. Repenning, Hardcover

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 are costly, rarely improve productivity, and always add a lot of busywork. There's Got to Be a Better Way is an antidote, transforming how you understand your own tasks and your organization's workflow, allowing you to redesign your work to boost productivity, profit and genuine engagement.

Author: Nelson P. Repenning, Donald C. Kieffer
Publisher: Basic Venture
Published: 08/26/2025
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Size: 9.50h x 6.25w x 1.05d
ISBN: 9781541704626

About the Author

Nelson P. Repenning is the School of Management Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the director of MIT's Leadership Center and Poets & Quants named him one of the world's top executive MBA instructors. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Donald C. Kieffer is a senior lecturer in operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and founder of ShiftGear Work Design. He was previously vice president of operational excellence for Harley-Davidson. He lives in Somerville, MA and Burlingame, CA.