Managing the reengineered corporation
James Champy on what to do after you've changed everything around
© 2003 by Michael Finley
The blockbuster revelation of James Champy is 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.
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 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.
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James Champy