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"America's business problem is that
it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed
during the nineteenth century." So write Michael Hammer
and James Champy in this pioneering book on the most important
topic in business circles today: reengineering -- the radical
redesign of a company's processes, organization, and culture.
Reengineering the Corporation offers nothing less
than a brand-new vision of how companies should be organized
and managed if they are to succeed -- indeed even survive
-- in the 1990s and beyond. Reengineering does not seek
to make businesses better through incremental improvements
-- 10 percent faster here or 20 percent less expensive there.
The aim of reengineering is a quantum leap in performance
-- the 100 percent of even tenfold improvements that can
follow from entirely new work processes and structures.
Building on their firsthand experiences,
Hammer and Champy show how some of the world's premier corporations
use the principles of reengineering to save hundreds of
millions of dollars a year, to achieve unprecedented levels
of customer satisfaction, and to speed up and make more
flexible all aspects of their operations. The key to reengineering
is abandoning the most basic notions on which the modern
organization is founded. Today's workers and managers are
prisoners of antiquated theories about organizing work --
theories that date back to the beginnings of the Industrial
Revolution. These ideas -- the division of labor, the need
for elaborate controls, the managerial hierarchy -- no longer
work in a world of global competition and unrelenting change.
In their stead, the authors introduce the notion of process
orientation, of concentrating on and rethinking end-to-end
activities that create value for customers.
This book is about more than ideas, however.
From their work with leading companies around the world,
Hammer and Champy have learned how to make reengineering
succeed. They lay out the approaches that have enabled such
companies as Bell Atlantic, Taco Bell, and Hallmark Cards
to reinvent themselves. They offer a vision of the reengineered
corporation and a road map for companies to follow in getting
there.
Reengineering the Corporation is
the authoritative guide to creating a new kind of company
for the new world of business. It is indeed a manifesto
for business revolution.
Dr. Michael Hammer is the originator
and leading exponent of the concept of reengineering and
the founder of the reengineering movement. He is the author
of the seminal Harvard Business Review article "Reengineering
Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate." Dr. Hammer is president
of Hammer and Company, Inc., a management education and
consulting firm. He was named by Business Week as
one of the four preeminent management gurus of the 1990s;
he regularly addresses and consults with executive management
of the world's leading companies; and his seminars on reengineering
are attended by thousands of people annually. He has been
profiled in the New York Times, the Boston Globe,
and numerous business publications. Dr. Hammer was formerly
a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
James Champy, chairman of CSC Index,
Inc., is the leading authority on the implementation of
business reengineering initiatives. CSC Index is the management
consulting firm that pioneered the development and practice
of reengineering. The firm's clients include many leading
corporations that have successfully reengineered. Mr. Champy
specializes in working with senior executives in large organizations
to achieve major financial and operating improvements in
large change initiatives. He has been featured in Fortune,
the New York Times,
the Boston Globe,
and the Wall Street Journal.
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