Beyond Reengineering
Beyond Reengineering
The Reengineer Who Could
by Michael Finley
The blockbuster revelation of James Champy's day with The Masters Forum June 6 was that the title for Reengineering Management, his follow-up to all-time best-selling business book Reengineering the Corporation, had to be forced on him by his publisher.
Champy had wanted to call his book something along the lines of A New Philosophy of Management because philosophy was the element he found missing in the field of management. Fortunately for Champy, the publisher painted a picture of the marketplace success of books with the word philosophy in the title.
What is reengineering?
To answer this question, you have to go back to the founding year of 1776. That's capitalism's founding, not the USA's. Adam Smith that year published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
In it he described a model for division of labor, a model that owed much to the mechanistic thinking of that era, and perhaps something to the hierarchical thinking of previous times. It is a description of an organization as a machine, with ranks of unskilled workers directed by skilled workers, each person performing a single task.
The model reached its zenith in the bureaucratic ideal — lots of people, lots of supervisors, supervisors for the supervisors, a million doors, an enormous infrastructure, etc. This engine massed to win the Second World War and ruled the postwar economic world for many years, until leaner global competitors and emerging information technologies at home combined to make it obsolete.
To a large extent, the transformational challenge facing today's managers and executives is to fashion a bridge between the bureaucratic model of doing business and a leaner, more efficient, and smarter way.
This bridge-making is called reengineering, and everyone is doing it.
Process and results
In their original collaboration, Michael Hammer and Champy's official definition of reengineering started with processes and worked toward results:
Business reengineering is the process of fundamentally changing the way work is performed in order to achieve radical performance improvements in speed, cost, quality, market share, and return on investment.
In contrast, Champy took pains to describe reengineering to The Masters Forum less in terms of process redesign — redesigning the way work is done, essentially a quality approach — and more in terms of business results. "Without results, reengineering is meaningless," he said.
In Champy's mind, reengineering calls us to a new way of thinking. Traditionally, we think in left-to-right terms. We read from left to right. Our sense of time moves from left to right. To reengineer what already is, however, we need to start on the right side — with a "crazy idea" of a better operating model, and of being — and slowly build a workable pathway to the existing model. That leftward mental journey is perhaps the most difficult task an organization can perform.
Reengineering can be driven by two forces, fear or vision, both arising not from organizational charts but from whatever passes for corporate spirit. Fear is the most common driver, and it is a powerful motivator. It sometimes comes too late; organizations are hard put to transform their ways when they are already on fire, being transformed nature's way.
The other route is rarer but usually has greater chances of success. There is little in organizational life that is more powerful than a clear vision of a fundamentally better way to serve customers, alter an industry, and rewrite the rules of competition.
Champy leans heavily on the word radical. Reengineering isn't incremental change, which Champy contends has less chance of succeeding than wholesale transformation. Neither is it to be confused with restructuring or two-dimensional cost reduction initiatives.
You will know you are really reengineering when your efforts are so ambitious they scare even you, and when the thrust of your efforts is to undo the creeping fragmentation — the breakup of an organization into a thousand bottlenecks — that is the natural consequence of bureaucracy.
Reengineering management
People have asked Champy if resistance to reengineering isn't a generational thing, and he says no. He's met plenty of older executives who are eager to charge into the new age of empowerment, transformation, and process redesign and plenty of youngsters with a reactionary, do-it-the-way-it's-always-been-done philosophy.
At the same time, he ruefully concedes that reengineering often fails because, deep down, people at the top of the corporate power structure don't believe upheaval is necessary and think that the struggling corporation simply needs to get back to basics. That "the basics" no longer apply in a changed world is a thought unthunk.
The long haul
Champy summed up the transition of the bureaucratic organization to the reengineered as the passage from a focus on Strategy, Structure and Purpose to a focus on Purpose, Process, Culture, and People.
The transition is historic. In many ways, it seems to take the "man" out of management — the culturally masculine connotations of command and control are replaced with traits and skills that in our culture have been considered the feminine province: listening, interacting, teaching, creating a habitable culture in which others may thrive.
To those blinded by the old ways, the new ways seem more preposterous than they are. Champy has gotten grief for his story of the grocery chain that experienced a sudden delivery problem at the end of a shift. A manager gave the delivery people a choice between making a "midnight run" to restock several stores before they ran out or going home to bed.
In the old days, this would not have been a choice laid out to workers. It would have been an order. It would have been time to strap on one's managerial shootin' irons. Surely the people who delivered the goods could not be trusted with such a decision. But Champy pointed out that workers identified the same business issues management would have considered: reliability is good business, and good business is good for jobs.
"Intelligent people who care about the job they do will usually make the right decision," Champy said. Likewise, a culture of quality may occur in any industry, at any market level. It is a faint surprise to learn that the makers of Lexus, a $50,000 car, will come to your house and revive your downed auto. It is a bigger surprise to learn that a bargain car company, Korea's Khia, plans to offer substantially the same front-curb service for the $10,000 cars it is rolling out to the American market.
Right to left thinking
Champy spoke of four new managerial tasks for the new age:
Champy closed with some green-grass thinking of his own. As we grope toward a right-to-left vision of where we will be in our industry, will it be a good place or a bad place? Everyone has to be someplace, so why not work toward making it a good place, where people will want to do good work? He spoke of a "new covenant" between employer and employee that would guarantee employees not security — those days, alas, appear to be gone forever — but training, portability of benefits, and simple respect.
Champy ticked off a handful of characteristics he deemed desirable in the workplace of the future. Consider each one, compare it to the place where you are now working, and ask yourself, in true right-to-left fashion, what it will take to get there from here.
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