Michael Hammer has been, since the early 1990s, one of the most quoted management authors. He co-authored Reengineering the Corporation, which has worldwide sales of more than two million. No wonder, then, that TIME magazine included him in its first list of America’s 25 most influential individuals. His latest book, The Agenda, delineates nine ways managers can compete more effectively in the 21st century. A company can have brilliant leadership and an effective strategy, but these don’t guarantee success. What’s too often missing—and, therefore, what has always interested me the most—is operations: getting things done. I’m on an eternal quest for more effective ways of executing.
• The domain in which I specialise is different from that of most other management thinkers. I often refer to myself as ‘a plumber’. I’m concerned with how companies do and should operate, how best to get work done, and how to organise an enterprise so that work will be done that way. Specifically, I am a believer in process: that it’s better for a company to develop a system that will produce an unending stream of results, rather than hope for brilliant ideas and individual heroics.
• While many of my colleagues are professors, consultants, or inspirational speakers, I think of myself as mostly a teacher. Trying to discover and communicate the best ways to get work done is what drives me, and is what underlies the educational programmes that I present to thousands of managers each year. Instead of selling fish, I teach fishing.
• I owe a lot to someone I’ve never met but respect immensely. David Halberstam and his milestone book The Reckoning moved me greatly. I still quote from that book, even though I first read it in the mid 1980s when I was a technology consultant. At that time, I had recently left my MIT faculty position, and I was working with companies to help them use automation and technology more effectively.
• I ultimately concluded that technology utilisation was only a fraction of the real problem, and that the best technology could not help a company that was organised ineffectively and had poorly designed processes. Without rethinking the basics, we would end up paving the cow paths. That’s why The Reckoning grabbed me so strongly. What Halberstam did in that book was to track the parallel histories of Nissan and Ford. As he looked at the two companies over a long period (roughly 1947 to 1983), his chapters on Ford were a damning indictment of what was (and is) wrong with many enterprises.
• The book was a revelation to me: it confirmed and elaborated my worst fears about large organisations. In the book Ford was depicted as a company more focused on financial issues rather than operational ones. How to design, make, and sell cars was less important than how to manage a balance sheet. Halberstam’s insights made me face up to the fact that my technology advice would do little good unless companies rethought their priorities. I still have my copy with my marginal notations; some of the anecdotes in The Reckoning are burned into my memory. However, we can’t be too critical of companies like Ford (whom I have worked with and, hopefully, helped since reading that book). After all, we still haven’t had that much experience with large enterprises, and it
• Michael Hammer is the originator of both the concept of ‘re-engineering’ and of ‘the process enterprise’. Through his teaching and research, he works with the management teams of leading companies to bring about fundamental change in their organisations..
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