Beyond Reengineering: How the Process-Centered Organization Is Changing Our Work and Our Lives
- Book Review,
by Michael Hammer
Amazon.com
The coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation offers insights into the consequences of today's process-centered reengineering that marks the end of the Industrial Revolution. This book is required reading for executives and front-line workers, for students and investors, for everyone who wants to be prepared for the new world that is at our doorstep.
From Library Journal
Reengineering guru Hammer transcends his earlier blockbuster (with James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation, HarperBusiness, 1993) with a work explaining how a shift to process, as a means of reengineering, will profoundly transform an organization. As companies attempt to reengineer their operations, subtle but powerful forces must be dealt with, and Hammer takes us through them?the impact on the individual, the massive role change of leaders, the new skills necessary to work successfully in this new environment, the interconnectedness with suppliers, the changing nature of long-term careers, and the means by which a company can reassess their key processes. Hammer explains how best to deal with these complexities. But he offers little on applying process in organized companies, which presents peculiar difficulties. In addition, he inappropriately uses the term reengineering when referring to purposefully downsizing a company, and the chapter that relates this idea to a sports team is out of place. Still, titled with the reengineering moniker, this is powerful stuff that will stimulate sales. Suitable for larger public libraries and all academic libraries.?Dale F. Farris, Groves, Tex.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Stephen R. Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Hammer has done it again! First, he defined reengineering. Now, he defines the staggering, even radical, implications of the customer-driven process-centered organization on work and management, structure and strategy. Everyone's future will be impacted by such a paradigm shift.
This system has now crashed due to its own weight and overhead. It simply was too inflexible, too error prone, and too costly for the new and dynamic global economy. From its ashes is rising a new kind of business in which workers focus on processes, whole sequences of work, rather than on simple tasks like filling customer orders, for example, or only focusing on scheduling shipments. From this seemingly simple shift flow endless consequences, which Hammer details in Beyond Reengineering. In the process-centered organization, workers are professionals and not automatons. They have broad, self-managed jobs; they focus on customers, not bosses; managers support them, not control them; and they are paid for results, not for showing up. Case in point: GTE's Bob Rankin. Instead of just repairing broken customer phones, he now decides which customers to visit and when to do preventive maintenance, repair and even sell add-on services. Customers are delighted. The company's costs are down. And for the first time, Bob feels like he is being treated like an adult. These changes in the workplace affect each and every one of us, which is why Beyond Reengineering is not just a business book. Rather, it provides an understanding of what we must do to prepare ourselves and our children for an economy in which all of the familiar rules have been broken. The process-centered corporation will have a dramatic impact on our careers, our earning power, and our family lives. About the Author: Dr. Michael Hammer is the originator and leading exponent of the concepts of reengineering and process-centering. Heralded by Business Week as one of the four preeminent management thinkers of the 1990s, his first book, Reengineering the Corporation (co-written with James Champy), was a New York Times bestseller for more than 60 weeks. Hammer regularly addresses senior executives of the world's leading companies. His seminars on reengineering are attended by thousands of people annually, and his videotapes educate many thousands more. Before starting his own company, Hammer served for almost ten years as a professor of computer science at MIT and founded several high technology companies.
From Booklist
The problem with being a prophet or even a guru lies in the sequels: once your ideas or philosophies are adapted by the masses, what next? Such is the case with Hammer, whose first book, Reengineering the Corporation, coauthored with James Champy, stormed America's corporate castles and was blamed, in part, for the downsizings that followed. His second book, The Reengineering Revolution, tried to add the phrase "employees as most valuable assets" to company reengineering lexicons. Now, in book number three, he focuses on the process-centered organization and its future in terms of changes in worker and manager status, the definition of a company, and impact on strategic planning and on tomorrow's employees. A basic shift in the concept of reengineering, from "radical redesign" (i.e., "let's throw everything out" ) to "process-centered" ("what combination of tasks comprises this process?" ) is a challenge to contemporary corporate mind-set, forcing a reexamination of the very soul of a company. Barbara Jacobs
Book Description
Reengineering has captured the imagination of managers and shareholders alike, sending corporations on journeys of radical business redesign that have already begun to transfigure global industry. Yet aside from earning them improvements in their business performance, the shift into more-process-centered organizations is causing fundamental changes in the corporate world, changes that business leaders are only now beginning to understand. What will the revolutions final legacy be? Beyond Reengineering addresses this question, exploring reengineering's effects on such areas as: Jobs: What does process-centering do to the nature of jobs? What does a process-centered workplace feel like? Managers: What is the new role of the manager in a process-centered company? Education: What skills are vital in the process-centered working world, and how can young or inexperienced workers prepare? Society: What are the implications of process-centering for employment and the economy as a whole? Investment: What are the characteristics of a successful 21st-century corporation? An informed look at one of the most profound changes to ever sweep the corporate world, Beyond Reengineering is the business manual for the 21st century.
Book Info
Author offers powerful insights into the consequences of the reengineering revolution and how they are changing our work and our lives. Provides more than a preview of tomorrow's business. Paper. DLC: Reengineering (Management)
About the Author
Dr. Michael Hammer is the leading exponent of reengineering and the founder of the reengineering movement. President of Hammer and Company, a Cambridge, Massachusetts management consulting and education firm, Hammer wrote the influential 1990 Harvard Business Reviewarticle, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate." He also co-authored thebestselling The Reengineering Revolutionand Reengineering the Corporation. Hammer regularly addresses and consults with many of the world's leading companies on the topic of business reengineering. His seminars on reengineering are attended by thousands of people annually. Hammer has been profiled in Business Week, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and numerous business publications. He was named one of the four preeminent management thinkers of the 1990's by Business Week and one of America's twenty five most influencial individuals by Time. He was formerly a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees.
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