Reengineering The Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution

"When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that what I really do is I'm reversing the Industrial Revolution."

In Reengineering The Corporation, Michael Hammer and James Champy do for modern business what Adam Smith did for the Industrial Revolution in The Wealth of Nations two centuries ago they reinvent the nature of work to create the single best hope for the competitive turnaround of business.

Adam Smith broke work down into specialised tasks; Hammer and Champy look at the overall nature of work and ask the revolutionary question, "Why do we do what we do at all?" Instead of tinkering with - or simply computerising an aspect of the work design, the answer is to radically redesign the whole process. Business reengineering isn't about fixing anything - it's about starting again, about reinventing our corporations from top to bottom.

For businesses to survive in an ever-changing world, they must completely rethink how and why they do what they do. Every company is replete with implicit rules left over from earlier decades:

"Customers don't repair their own equipment"

These rules are based on assumptions about technology, people and organisational goals which no longer hold. "Unless companies change these rules, any superficial reorganisation they perform will be no more effective than dusting the furniture in Pompeii."

Reengineering is a practice that is taking off with great urgency in the business community - a long list of major companies that are already "reinventing" themselves in alignment with Hammer and Champy's ideas include British Airways, Ford, Texas Instruments, and Hallmark Cards.

Reengineering is set to be for the '90s what Strategy was for the '70s and Quality was for the '80s. After a decade of restructuring and downsizing, of cutting costs and capacity, managers need to rethink boldly to yield the dramatic improvements for companies, both big and small, to compete successfully in a changing world. This book shows them how.

ISBN:9781857880298