Nelson Repenning a Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he also serves as Director of MIT’s Leadership Center. He  has been named by Poets & Quants as one of the world’s top executive MBA instructors.

Nelson’s early work focused on understanding the inability of organizations to leverage well established business practices.  His 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.  Nelson’s current work focuses on developing the theory and practice of Dynamic Work Design – a new approach to designing work that is both effective and engaging.

From these efforts of ensuring that day-to-day work is tightly linked to strategic objectives, Nelson recently published a groundbreaking book, There’s Got to Be a Better Way:  How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of Stuff that Gets in the Way.  Here he explores clearing the organization roadblocks that keep you from doing your job.  The chaos of everyday business forces people into exhausting, ineffective, seemingly never-ending cycle of work-arounds, firefighting, and Whac-a-Mole.   The irritatingly urgent crowds out the lastingly important.   

He holds a BA in economics from Colorado College and a PhD in operations management and system dynamics from MIT.