Book review

Beyond Reengineering

By: Michael Hammer

Price: #20.00

Publisher: Harper Collins

Not him again, surely? Not that dreadful “R” word, that we don’t use any more? Yes, Michael Hammer is back, with the most predictably titled sequel since Rocky IV, and seemingly unaware of the opprobrium that is about to be heaped on his head. For in the years since the Hammer came down on us, one word has come to symbolise in the public mind everything that is wrong with consultants, and that is “reengineering”.

Only the other day some bird-brained Sunday columnist was twittering on about it in the course of the usual anti-consultant rant: “Re-engineering,” she chirruped, “apparently means ‘doing things differently’.”

All this is of course monstrously unfair on Mr Hammer, whose major crime was not to invent the term “reengineering” but to fail to copyright it.

As a result the business world was swamped under a tide of wannabes, copycats, passers-off and plain charlatans, all peddling various brands of snake-oil that they called reengineering. Even to this day, there are companies that are blissfully under the impression that they have been reengineered when they are as close to being process-driven organisations as processed cheese is ripe Camembert.

In this “revolution” it is difficult to work out who did the most damage, old-style consultancies who merely relabelled their old methodologies “reengineering” or half-witted triers who were trying to implement concepts they failed to understood. The upshot was, in this country at least, that Hammer’s process revolution was buried under a mound of ham-fisted consultancy as surely as the Bolshevik revolution was buried under Stalinist autocracy. For a great many organisations therefore, the process revolution is still out there, waiting to happen.

Hammer seems to be aware of this, and this book is to some extent misnamed.

It should be called Reengineering the Corporation 2, like a new release of a computer game with snazzier graphics, new weapons and extra levels.

It is in many ways a wiser, calmer book than Reengineering, with less of that book’s full-steam-ahead-and-damn-the-torpedoes attitude, which is a shame for those of us (like me) who read management books mainly for fun.

Hammer now has insights from several ongoing reengineering projects to draw on, and has deepened his analysis, particularly to include aspects of change management and people issues that were glossed over in the earlier work. There is a lot more discussion of the reengineering process itself, and, more encouragingly, detailed consideration of what working in a reengineered organisation might be like. Previously, one got the impression that reengineering was about designing the perfect organisation and then shoehorning the employees into it, a sort of Procrustean bed approach that did wonders for staff relations.

However, the most valuable insights come in the chapter on strategy: not that strategy was overlooked in earlier reengineering theory: reengineering was the strategy. Hammer’s re-examination of strategy from a process viewpoint overturns some conventional wisdom on the subject: Don’t think about what markets you want to be in, he suggests, think about what markets the processes you excel at allow you to enter. You are what you do, is the message.

This is, as I have said, a book that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

However, whether many readers will get past the title remains to be seen.

Management Redeemed

By: Frederick G Hilmer and Lex Donaldson

Price: #15.99

Publisher: Free Press

Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of management thought, where backlash follows fad and counterbacklash follows backlash at such a pace that you can miss a few cycles by taking a week’s holiday.

In the States, a whole movement has sprung out of that country’s traditional rugged individualism, known as “contrarianism”. This book is firmly in that tradition, although the authors are in fact Australian academics, one (Hilmer) also having worked for McKinsey.

Their thesis could be summarised as “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water”, for this book is nothing less than a defence of hierarchical management structures. It puts them in direct opposition to the sling-it-and-start-over philosophies of Michael Hammer and Tom Peters. Surely, they argue, generations of management must have generated some accumulated wisdom? In one fascinating chapter they mount a head-on attack on those who argue for looser more federal structures in corporations. Such structures are nor new, they argue. But, they claim, when they appeared before – such as in the English family-run firm – they were crushed by well-organised hierarchies.

The authors seek to protect firms against the destabilising effects of quick-fix fads, in which they would include reengineering, TQM, “gainsharing” and so forth. They also warn against the school of management writing (which started with Peters’ In Search of Excellence) which looks at a number of successful companies and attempts to extract the n steps to success. Is it likely, they ask, that the success factors of a complex organisation like General Electric can be boiled down into a simple formula?

Even if it could, this is what worked for GE in the past. Who knows if it is applicable to your company in the future?

Hilmer and Donaldson argue for an action-based management that spends more time out in the world doing things and less time sitting around analysing and reflecting. Managers contribute most by what they do, based on intuition and expertise.

Also, they argue, managers do better without an independent board to hold them back: so far from safeguarding the rights of shareholders, they claim, independent boards act as a brake on innovation.

Finally they argue for a resurrection of the idea that management should be raised to the status of a profession – with some interesting views on how far current MBA education falls short of this ideal. A persuasively argued contrarian case, then – a pity that the action-oriented, intuition-driven manager it idolises will probably never get round to reading it.

Fast Forward

Edited by: James Champy and Nitin Nohria

Price: $24.95

Publisher: Harvard Business School

If on the other hand, you are the reflective type, and believe in immersing yourself in a plethora of new ideas, this could be the book for you.

A compendium of essays on business change, it is co-edited by Re-engineering the Corporation co-author James Champy and includes Mike Hammer’s seminal essay, Don’t Automate-Obliterate. Other classics include Peter Drucker’s The Coming of the New Organisation, and John Kotter’s Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.

Other names featured include Richard Pascale, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Abraham Zaleznik. In many ways the collection is the antithesis of the previous book, taking the theme that change is all pervasive and requires complete rethinking of both organisational structures and management roles.

Other than that, there is no party line to this collection, it’s simply a gathering together of some of the more significant articles on business transformation from the last decade or so of the Harvard Business Review, so it’s a handy buy if you never quite got round to taking out that subscription.