ShiftGear has its origins in a chance meeting at Harley-Davidson in 1996 between Don Kieffer, who was leading the development of Harley’s Twin Cam 88 engine, and Nelson Repenning, an MIT PhD who was studying why companies weren’t using existing sophisticated tools to manage complex operations.
Don and Nelson joined forces to help deliver both the Twin Cam 88 engine project and a new product development organization. As they pushed this collaboration further, they discovered better ways to tackle many difficult challenges in the workplace.
In 2007, Don started a small consulting group and began teaching at MIT with Nelson. Nelson formally joined Don as a consulting partner in 2014.
Leveraging Nelson’s research at MIT Sloan in systems dynamics and organization studies and Don’s decade of hands-on operation experience at Harley-Davidson and global consulting, they make a great team. Their work combines Don’s deep practical understanding of the intricacies of the modern workplace and Nelson’s award-winning analysis of organizational dynamics.
Together, they devised the discipline of Dynamic Work Design, a proven approach to improving productivity, reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and getting work to flow smoothly across the organization
ShiftGear’s Dynamic Work Design is the product of 25 years of award-winning academic research at MIT and 40 years of on-the-job experience from the shop floor to the C-suite.