Every day, knowledge workers face the challenge of managing competing priorities and constant interruptions. When systems are managing us rather than us managing them, productivity suffers and morale plummets. But what if the key to improvement isn't complex reorganization but rather understanding how work actually flows through your team or organization? How can visualizing your workflow and regulating for flow transform productivity? What small, incremental changes might lead to dramatic improvements in both output and job satisfaction?
Nelson P. Repenning is the Faculty Director of the MIT Leadership Center and the School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His early work focused on understanding the inability of organizations to leverage well-established tools and practices. He has worked extensively with organizations trying to develop new capabilities in both manufacturing and new product development. Nelson has also studied the failure to use the safety practices that often lead to industrial accidents and has helped investigate several major incidents. This line of research has been recognized with several awards, including best paper recognition from both the California Management Review and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. Building on his earlier work, Nelson now focuses on developing the theory and practice of Dynamic Work Design—a new approach to designing work that is both effective and engaging—and Dynamic Management Systems, a method for ensuring that day-to-day work is tightly linked to the strategic objectives of the firm. His book (co-authored with Don Kieffer) There Has Got to Be a Better Way describing Dynamic Work Design will be published by Public Affairs in 2025. He is also a partner at ShiftGear Work Design and serves as its chief social scientist. In 2003, Nelson received the International System Dynamics Society’s Jay Wright Forrester Award, which recognizes the best work in the field in the previous five years. In 2011 he received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He was recently recognized by Poets and Quants as one of the country's top instructors in executive education.
Donald Kieffer is a Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at MIT Sloan.He is a career operations executive and co-creator of Dynamic Work Design. Kieffer started working running equipment in factories at age 17. He was VP of operational excellence at Harley-Davidson where he worked for 15 years. Since 2007, he has been advising executive teams around the globe in a range of areas including strategy deployment, product development, and operational improvement. Don has worked with industries as diverse as oil/gas, medical, biomedical, and banking. His guidance was instrumental in transforming both the production and technical development areas of a Cambridge-based genomic sequencing organization, now an industry leader, using the techniques of Dynamic Work Design. He is founder of ShiftGear Work Design, LLC and also teaches Operations Management at AVT in Copenhagen.
In the episode, Richie, Nelson and Don explore the challenges of daily firefighting at work, the principles of dynamic work design, how to improve productivity by addressing real problems, the role of AI in business, the importance of setting clear priorities, and much more.
Links Mentioned in the Show:
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