There's Got to Be a Better Way (August 28, 2025)
Issue No. 655 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a contrarian master class in meetings management and “dynamic work flow”—but so much more. Book-of-the-year, maybe? And check out the 20 management buckets (core competencies). Subscribe to this enews here.
NOTE! Effective Oct. 1, 2025, all 657 posts previously featured on Typepad.com will be slowly (!) moved to this blog. New book reviews in John's eNews will also be archived here.
There’s Got to Be a Better Way, just published August 26, describes a “Barbecue the Boss” exercise with a team of 50 people—each with three sticky notes. “While the boss is speaking, I want each of you to write three questions about what you hear.” No question was off-limits. Brilliant!
A Contrarian Master Class in Meetings Management
Here are two options for your last week of summer!
OPTION #1: Squeeze in one more beach read (a really good one—watch for my review):
OPTION #2: Get a jump on fixing those pesky problems at work (I can’t stop talking about this one!):
OPTION #1: Squeeze in one more beach read (a really good one—watch for my review):
The Color of Death: A Novel
by Trey Gowdy and Christopher Greyson (Aug. 26, 2025)
by Trey Gowdy and Christopher Greyson (Aug. 26, 2025)
OPTION #2: Get a jump on fixing those pesky problems at work (I can’t stop talking about this one!):
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
by Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer
(Aug. 26, 2025)
How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff
That Gets in the Way of Real Work
by Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer
(Aug. 26, 2025)
ANY “FIREFIGHTING ARSONISTS” IN YOUR ORGANIZATION? Is your work flow characterized by LEW (late, expensive, and wrong)? Are team members trapped in a permanent state of crisis management? Help has arrived!
Don Kieffer, co-author of this stunning book, describes a midsize company that assigned 50 people to a new project—and in six months they were already three months behind schedule! Yikes! The problem: the targets and intents were not clear (the what and the why).
Solution? Kieffer facilitated a “Barbeque the Boss” exercise. (It’s brilliant and I know you’ll borrow this idea.)
MEETING #1: Kieffer opened the session by inviting the company’s top 10 executives, including the CEO, to take 10 minutes “to write down the goals of the project and why the goals mattered.” Next, “the executives’ responses were taped to the wall. Everyone walked around and examined each other’s answers, which to their surprise included a ‘secret’ goal from the CFO!”
“The room fell silent. They saw how gaps in thinking on the executive team led directly to the problems the project team was having.” Yikes, again! If the 10 execs were not on the same page—how could they expect a team of 50 to be on the same page? (I know this has never happened in your company or organization, right?)
MEETING #2: The team of 50 (way behind schedule) was then invited to the second meeting with the 10 execs for the “Barbeque the Boss” exercise! Brilliant! Kieffer limited the CEO’s presentation to just 10 minutes and just one PowerPoint slide. (Small miracle there, right?)
“In most sessions where the boss gives a big presentation, she closes by asking if there are any questions, and awkward silence usually follows.” (Maybe softball questions—you know the drill.) “Nobody wants to speak first or challenge the boss in public.”
Kieffer was ready—and had prepped the team members with sticky notes. “While the boss is speaking, I want each of you to write three questions about what you hear.” No question was off-limits. “You can challenge any statement. Just be respectful of one another. Don’t sign your name,” he added. The goal—real questions that would prompt real answers. In the meeting!
Read the rest of the story—and the results in Chapter 4, “Structure for Discovery”—one of five principles in this practical, eye-opening book that you, too, won’t stop talking about. (How often have you moaned—“there’s got to be a better way.”) This book will help you fix the firefighting, the chaos, and the missed deadlines in your own organization. (I promise.)
Principle #1: Solve the Right Problem. LOL! Don Kieffer, now senior lecturer in operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was previously VP of operational excellence for Harley-Davidson. (Ask me about the time I won a 100th anniversary Harley at a trade show!)
In Kieffer’s first year as general manager of Harley-Davidson’s engine plant near Milwaukee, Wis., they were hosting more than 25,000 people per year on plant tours. Yet when reps from Ford Motor Company scouted the manufacturing plant to consider featuring it in a local Ford training seminar—the Harley plant flunked the site inspection! “And they weren’t too kind in how they told him either.”
Must-read: the exasperating exercise a consultant on Toyota standards and methods put Kieffer through—after the consultant asked him to turn off the PowerPoints!
The question: “Mr. Kieffer, can you please tell me the problem you want to solve?” (Trust me—if you just read these 25 pages of Chapter 3, you will have reaped at least 500 times the book's price. Easy.)
Principle #2: Structure for Discovery. Even if you have a generous training and development budget for your team members—this will shock you: “…the learning movement missed a far more fundamental fact: people who do work are learning every day.” And often, they draw “lessons from one or two very good or very bad experiences." (Must-read!)
Is this your culture? “The architects of the Toyota system solved this problem by changing the job description from ‘Do the work’ to ‘Do the work and help us discover a better way of doing it.’”
Principle #3: Connect the Human Chain—Putting People Back in the Work. Ready for one more must-read chapter? “In any system, the work chain consists of all the people and all the connections among them needed to pass work from one step to the next.” So do your meetings enhance and improve the work chain—or are they part of the problem?
“Connect the Human Chain” is a contrarian master class in meetings management—you'll learn when to use “handoffs” and when to use “huddles” (and the two types of huddles).
• “Handoffs are effective when the information being transferred is simple and well understood by both parties.”
• “A huddle, in contrast, is a better choice when the information or material being transferred isn't clear and requires a face-to-face discussion to work through issues to agree on how to proceed.”
• “Confusing the two—using a handoff when you need a huddle or a huddle when you need a handoff—can bring a work process to its knees.”
• “Sometimes a five-minute daily meeting or a few sticky notes on a whiteboard work better than millions of dollars in new IT.”
• Most frustrating issue in the workplace? “…too many meetings and too many bad meetings.”
There are two more powerful principles—but you’ll need to read, or listen to, this book to get the full story.
Principle #4: Regulate for Flow—Finish More by Controlling How Much You Start. (See the airplane door tactic and how an international bank got 16 risk managers to work together using a “common backlog” meeting and an “improvement hour” meeting.)
Principle #5: Visualize the Work—Making the Invisible Visible. (Why Fannie Mae used $30 of string and clothes pins “to create a visual representation called the Close Line”—and reduced the time to close its books by almost 80 percent.)
Confession! I read Chapter 9 first, “Getting Started (Without Posters, Coffee Cups, and Three-Ring Binders).” Then, no way could I ignore this wisdom. I had to read the whole book!
Old Management-Theory Wine in New Bottles! "The culture that has arisen around organizational change, aided and abetted by academics and consultants, tends to amplify management’s most destructive tendencies. They keep packaging the same management-theory wine in newly labeled bottles, and it never works any better than it did before. Each failed attempt breeds cynicism and disengagement as frontline employees come to perceive such efforts as little more than executive flights of fancy.”
Co-author Nelson Repenning is the School of Management Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Named one of the world’s top executive MBA instructors, he is the director of MITs Leadership Center. (Is it too late for me to go back to school?) He writes:
“The biggest concern that Don and I had in writing this book is simply that it would turn dynamic work design into another initiative. The moment dynamic work design is delivered to an entire organization as a two-day training course (with a half-day overview for busy senior executives) replete with posters, binders, and coffee mugs, we know that its impact will be minimal. Ultimately, we think of dynamic work design as the anti-initiative. It is a proven antidote to the [BS] and silliness that so often defined the modern organization. But that antidote doesn't work in one big dose.” He adds that it is “…a lifestyle change, not a diet.”
Hard work? Yes. Payoffs? Definitely. Read about the boss who now is frequently kicked out of meetings because she’s not needed! And the four-hour meeting that is now just 20 minutes. And the organization where firefighting nearly disappeared. And why the team member who supposedly was “dropping the ball” almost every day just needed a dependable printer. (The boss gave her his credit card to go and buy two printers—one for backup.) There’s more:
• Why one team opens every meeting with the question, “Are there any fires?”—and leverages a 16-box chart on the wall with four columns (page 237).
• Why the contrarian wisdom, “Bite Off Less Than You Think You Can Chew,” works so well—and why you should “scope it down” when tackling big problems. Think 30 to 60 days and assign just six to eight people on the problem.
• Why you might buy this book for your doctor’s office waiting room!
• Why writing a good problem statement will be your biggest take-away from this book.
And this: “We have come to believe…that problem formation is the single most underrated skill in management.”
I know three colleagues who will insist that I name this my 2025 book-of-the-year.*
TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for 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, by Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer. Listen on Libro. And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.
Don Kieffer, co-author of this stunning book, describes a midsize company that assigned 50 people to a new project—and in six months they were already three months behind schedule! Yikes! The problem: the targets and intents were not clear (the what and the why).
Solution? Kieffer facilitated a “Barbeque the Boss” exercise. (It’s brilliant and I know you’ll borrow this idea.)
MEETING #1: Kieffer opened the session by inviting the company’s top 10 executives, including the CEO, to take 10 minutes “to write down the goals of the project and why the goals mattered.” Next, “the executives’ responses were taped to the wall. Everyone walked around and examined each other’s answers, which to their surprise included a ‘secret’ goal from the CFO!”
“The room fell silent. They saw how gaps in thinking on the executive team led directly to the problems the project team was having.” Yikes, again! If the 10 execs were not on the same page—how could they expect a team of 50 to be on the same page? (I know this has never happened in your company or organization, right?)
MEETING #2: The team of 50 (way behind schedule) was then invited to the second meeting with the 10 execs for the “Barbeque the Boss” exercise! Brilliant! Kieffer limited the CEO’s presentation to just 10 minutes and just one PowerPoint slide. (Small miracle there, right?)
“In most sessions where the boss gives a big presentation, she closes by asking if there are any questions, and awkward silence usually follows.” (Maybe softball questions—you know the drill.) “Nobody wants to speak first or challenge the boss in public.”
Kieffer was ready—and had prepped the team members with sticky notes. “While the boss is speaking, I want each of you to write three questions about what you hear.” No question was off-limits. “You can challenge any statement. Just be respectful of one another. Don’t sign your name,” he added. The goal—real questions that would prompt real answers. In the meeting!
Read the rest of the story—and the results in Chapter 4, “Structure for Discovery”—one of five principles in this practical, eye-opening book that you, too, won’t stop talking about. (How often have you moaned—“there’s got to be a better way.”) This book will help you fix the firefighting, the chaos, and the missed deadlines in your own organization. (I promise.)
Principle #1: Solve the Right Problem. LOL! Don Kieffer, now senior lecturer in operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was previously VP of operational excellence for Harley-Davidson. (Ask me about the time I won a 100th anniversary Harley at a trade show!)
In Kieffer’s first year as general manager of Harley-Davidson’s engine plant near Milwaukee, Wis., they were hosting more than 25,000 people per year on plant tours. Yet when reps from Ford Motor Company scouted the manufacturing plant to consider featuring it in a local Ford training seminar—the Harley plant flunked the site inspection! “And they weren’t too kind in how they told him either.”
Must-read: the exasperating exercise a consultant on Toyota standards and methods put Kieffer through—after the consultant asked him to turn off the PowerPoints!
The question: “Mr. Kieffer, can you please tell me the problem you want to solve?” (Trust me—if you just read these 25 pages of Chapter 3, you will have reaped at least 500 times the book's price. Easy.)
Principle #2: Structure for Discovery. Even if you have a generous training and development budget for your team members—this will shock you: “…the learning movement missed a far more fundamental fact: people who do work are learning every day.” And often, they draw “lessons from one or two very good or very bad experiences." (Must-read!)
Is this your culture? “The architects of the Toyota system solved this problem by changing the job description from ‘Do the work’ to ‘Do the work and help us discover a better way of doing it.’”
Principle #3: Connect the Human Chain—Putting People Back in the Work. Ready for one more must-read chapter? “In any system, the work chain consists of all the people and all the connections among them needed to pass work from one step to the next.” So do your meetings enhance and improve the work chain—or are they part of the problem?
“Connect the Human Chain” is a contrarian master class in meetings management—you'll learn when to use “handoffs” and when to use “huddles” (and the two types of huddles).
• “Handoffs are effective when the information being transferred is simple and well understood by both parties.”
• “A huddle, in contrast, is a better choice when the information or material being transferred isn't clear and requires a face-to-face discussion to work through issues to agree on how to proceed.”
• “Confusing the two—using a handoff when you need a huddle or a huddle when you need a handoff—can bring a work process to its knees.”
• “Sometimes a five-minute daily meeting or a few sticky notes on a whiteboard work better than millions of dollars in new IT.”
• Most frustrating issue in the workplace? “…too many meetings and too many bad meetings.”
There are two more powerful principles—but you’ll need to read, or listen to, this book to get the full story.
Principle #4: Regulate for Flow—Finish More by Controlling How Much You Start. (See the airplane door tactic and how an international bank got 16 risk managers to work together using a “common backlog” meeting and an “improvement hour” meeting.)
Principle #5: Visualize the Work—Making the Invisible Visible. (Why Fannie Mae used $30 of string and clothes pins “to create a visual representation called the Close Line”—and reduced the time to close its books by almost 80 percent.)
Confession! I read Chapter 9 first, “Getting Started (Without Posters, Coffee Cups, and Three-Ring Binders).” Then, no way could I ignore this wisdom. I had to read the whole book!
Old Management-Theory Wine in New Bottles! "The culture that has arisen around organizational change, aided and abetted by academics and consultants, tends to amplify management’s most destructive tendencies. They keep packaging the same management-theory wine in newly labeled bottles, and it never works any better than it did before. Each failed attempt breeds cynicism and disengagement as frontline employees come to perceive such efforts as little more than executive flights of fancy.”
Co-author Nelson Repenning is the School of Management Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Named one of the world’s top executive MBA instructors, he is the director of MITs Leadership Center. (Is it too late for me to go back to school?) He writes:
“The biggest concern that Don and I had in writing this book is simply that it would turn dynamic work design into another initiative. The moment dynamic work design is delivered to an entire organization as a two-day training course (with a half-day overview for busy senior executives) replete with posters, binders, and coffee mugs, we know that its impact will be minimal. Ultimately, we think of dynamic work design as the anti-initiative. It is a proven antidote to the [BS] and silliness that so often defined the modern organization. But that antidote doesn't work in one big dose.” He adds that it is “…a lifestyle change, not a diet.”
Hard work? Yes. Payoffs? Definitely. Read about the boss who now is frequently kicked out of meetings because she’s not needed! And the four-hour meeting that is now just 20 minutes. And the organization where firefighting nearly disappeared. And why the team member who supposedly was “dropping the ball” almost every day just needed a dependable printer. (The boss gave her his credit card to go and buy two printers—one for backup.) There’s more:
• Why one team opens every meeting with the question, “Are there any fires?”—and leverages a 16-box chart on the wall with four columns (page 237).
• Why the contrarian wisdom, “Bite Off Less Than You Think You Can Chew,” works so well—and why you should “scope it down” when tackling big problems. Think 30 to 60 days and assign just six to eight people on the problem.
• Why you might buy this book for your doctor’s office waiting room!
• Why writing a good problem statement will be your biggest take-away from this book.
And this: “We have come to believe…that problem formation is the single most underrated skill in management.”
I know three colleagues who will insist that I name this my 2025 book-of-the-year.*
TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for 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, by Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer. Listen on Libro. And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) In the MIT Executive MBA program, one participant initially described his problem: “My weekly staff meeting demotivates participants and inadvertently discourages participation and innovation.” But after understanding Principle #1, “Solve the Right Problem,” he rephrased the problem to: “My weekly staff meeting receives an average score of 3.5 (on a 5-point scale) against a target of 4.5.” (The short online survey solicited relative agreement with several statements—plus asking for ways to improve meetings.) Are you solving the right problem?
*2) If my oldest brother, Paul Pearson (1939-2015), were still with us today, he would insist that I name There’s Got to Be a Better Way as my 2025 book-of-the-year. Visit the Systems Bucket to read about Paul’s version of dynamic work design—while mentoring a team of volunteers assembling three-ring binders for a national conference. Note his management “crème de la crème” affirmation at the end of the project. Does our "dynamic work design" need help? Who should read this book first?
1) In the MIT Executive MBA program, one participant initially described his problem: “My weekly staff meeting demotivates participants and inadvertently discourages participation and innovation.” But after understanding Principle #1, “Solve the Right Problem,” he rephrased the problem to: “My weekly staff meeting receives an average score of 3.5 (on a 5-point scale) against a target of 4.5.” (The short online survey solicited relative agreement with several statements—plus asking for ways to improve meetings.) Are you solving the right problem?
*2) If my oldest brother, Paul Pearson (1939-2015), were still with us today, he would insist that I name There’s Got to Be a Better Way as my 2025 book-of-the-year. Visit the Systems Bucket to read about Paul’s version of dynamic work design—while mentoring a team of volunteers assembling three-ring binders for a national conference. Note his management “crème de la crème” affirmation at the end of the project. Does our "dynamic work design" need help? Who should read this book first?
SECOND READS: Fresh Solutions From Classic Books
You have changed—and your problems have changed—since you read this the first time!
Resource #25 of 99: Let Your Life Speak
For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by featuring Book #25 of 99 in our series, “Second Reads.” The big idea: REREAD TO LEAD! Discover how your favorite books still have more to teach you and the people you’re coaching and mentoring.
Let Your Life Speak:
Listening for the Voice of Vocation
by Parker J. Palmer
(25th Anniversary Edition, May 7, 2024)
Listening for the Voice of Vocation
by Parker J. Palmer
(25th Anniversary Edition, May 7, 2024)
Parker Palmer writes, “…a funny thing happened on the way to my vocation.” He was guided by Frederick Buechner’s inspiring insight: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
• Note: Reviewed in Issue No. 312, Nov. 22, 2014.
• Order from Amazon.
• Listen on Libro (3 hours, 25 minutes).
• Management Bucket #5 of 20: The Book Bucket
Favorite Story #1: The Clearness Committee. A presidential search committee for a small educational institution invited Palmer for an interview. “So as is the custom in the Quaker community, I called on half a dozen trusted friends to help me discern my vocation by means of a ‘clearness committee,’ a process in which the group refrains from giving you advice but spends three hours asking you honest, open questions to help discover your inner truth. (Looking back, of course, it is clear that my real intent in convening this group was not to discern anything but to brag about being offered a job I had already decided to accept!)”
• Note: Reviewed in Issue No. 312, Nov. 22, 2014.
• Order from Amazon.
• Listen on Libro (3 hours, 25 minutes).
• Management Bucket #5 of 20: The Book Bucket
Favorite Story #1: The Clearness Committee. A presidential search committee for a small educational institution invited Palmer for an interview. “So as is the custom in the Quaker community, I called on half a dozen trusted friends to help me discern my vocation by means of a ‘clearness committee,’ a process in which the group refrains from giving you advice but spends three hours asking you honest, open questions to help discover your inner truth. (Looking back, of course, it is clear that my real intent in convening this group was not to discern anything but to brag about being offered a job I had already decided to accept!)”
Save the Date!
Oct. 30, 2025
Irvine, Calif.
New and Improved! The Barnabas Group/Orange County is hosting a seminar at Concordia University in Irvine, Calif., on Oct. 30, 2025, Thursday 7:30 – 11:30 a.m. Nonprofit CEOs and board members (and pastors) are invited to learn about “The 8 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board: How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance.” Presented by John Pearson, the 4th edition of the workbook, available at the seminar, will include EIGHT, not just four BIG mistakes!! Register here.
Beware: Pitfalls and Snares!
Watch for my review of this new book from Robert E. Schraeder, PE, Ancient Secrets to Project Management: How to Lead and Thrive in Your Professional and Personal Life (Aug. 17, 2025). Must-read: Chapter 8, "Beware the Pitfalls and Snares of Success."
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