26 October 2006

Michael M Hammer - Collected Quotes

"At the heart of reengineering is the notion of discontinuous thinking—of recognizing and breaking away from the outdated rules and fundamental assumptions that underlie operations. Unless we change these rules, we are merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We cannot achieve breakthroughs in performance by cutting fat or automating existing processes. Rather, we must challenge old assumptions and shed the old rules that made the business underperform in the first place." (Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Magazine, 1990) [source]

"Conventional process structures are fragmented and piecemeal, and they lack the integration necessary to maintain quality and service. They are breeding grounds for tunnel vision, as people tend to substitute the narrow goals of their particular department for the larger goals of the process as a whole. When work is handed off from person to person and unit to unit, delays and errors are inevitable. Accountability blurs, and critical issues fall between the cracks." (Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Magazine, 1990) [source]

"In reengineering, managers break loose from outmoded business processes and the design principles underlying them and create new ones. [...] Reengineering requires looking at the fundamental processes of the business from a cross-functional perspective. [...] The reengineering team must keep asking Why? and What if? Why do we need to get a manager’s signature on a requisition? Is it a control mechanism or a decision point?" (Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Magazine, 1990) [source]

"In short, a reengineering effort strives for dramatic levels of improvement. It must break away from conventional wisdom and the constraints of organizational boundaries and should be broad and cross-functional in scope. It should use information technology not to automate an existing process but to enable a new one." (Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Magazine, 1990) [source]

"Information technology can capture and process data, and expert systems can to some extent supply knowledge, enabling people to make their own decisions. As the doers become self-managing and self-controlling, hierarchy - and the slowness and bureaucracy associated with it - disappears." (Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Magazine, 1990) [source]

"Reengineering cannot be planned meticulously and accomplished in small and cautious steps. It's an all-or-nothing proposition with an uncertain result. Still, most companies have no choice but to muster the courage to do it. For many, reengineering is the only hope for breaking away from the antiquated processes that threaten to drag them down." (Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Magazine, 1990) [source]

"Reengineering triggers changes of many kinds, not just of the business process itself. Job designs, organizational structures, management systems - anything associated with the process - must be refashioned in an integrated way. In other words, reengineering is a tremendous effort that mandates change in many areas of the organization." (Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Magazine, 1990) [source]

"A business process is a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer. A business process has a goal and is affected by events occurring in the external world or in other processes." (James A Champy & Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering the Corporation", 1993)

"A process perspective sees not individual tasks in isolation, but the entire collection of tasks that contribute to a desired outcome. Narrow points of view are useless in a process context. It just won't do for each person to be concerned exclusively with his or her own limited responsibility, no matter how well these responsibilities are met. When that occurs, the inevitable result is working at cross–purpose, misunderstanding, and the optimization of the part at the expense of the whole. Process work requires that everyone involved be directed toward a common goal; otherwise, conflicting objectives and parochial agendas impair the effort."  (James A Champy & Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering the Corporation", 1993)

"'Automating a mess yields an automated mess.' Unless an organization reconceptualized its operations, overlaying new technology on these operations accomplished little." (James A Champy & Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering the Corporation", 1993)

"Business reengineering isn't about fixing anything. Business reengineering means starting all over, starting from scratch. Business reengineering means putting aside much of the received wisdom of two hundred years of industrial management [...] How people and companies did things yesterday doesn't matter to the business reengineer." (James A Champy & Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering the Corporation", 1993)

"Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed." (James A Champy & Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering the Corporation", 1993)

"Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer." (James A Champy & Michael M Hammer, "Reengineering the Corporation", 1993)

"To succeed at reengineering, you have to be a missionary, a motivator, and a leg breaker." (Michael M Hammer, Fortune, August 1993)

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