Description: "The most useful book on creating enduring organizational change I have ever read" (Robert Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule)
Named a Best Book of the Year by Behavioral Scientist and Next Big Idea Club 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 for 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.Review Quotes: "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, Dean, MIT Sloan School of Management