Beyond Reengineering: How the Process-Centered Organization Is Changing Our Work and Our Lives

In 1990, Michael Hammer introduced the world to reengineering and set in motion a series of events that has transformed the business world beyond recognition. What began as an effort to improve performance has led to a complete rethinking of all aspects of business, from the jobs that people have to the ways in which companies are structured. In Beyond Reengineering, Hammer offers powerful insights into the consequences of the reengineering revolution and how they are changing our work and our lives.

To succeed -- or even to survive -- in today's global economy, companies must refocus and reorganize themselves around their processes: the end-to-end sequences of tasks that create customer value. This change, so easily described, in fact, marks the end of the Industrial Revolution and of the organizations that were designed for it. The process-centered organization is a complete break with the past. It means the end of narrow jobs, rigid hierarchies, supervisory management, traditional career paths and feudal cultures. It ushers in a world of professionals and coaches, process owners and results-based pay, boundaryless organizations and an institutionalized capacity for change. In this groundbreaking work, Hammer mines the experiences of individuals and organizations that already have made this transition to offer a compelling vision of an imminent future.

Beyond Reengineering provides more than a preview of tomorrow's businesses. It also offers an understanding of what we must all do to prepare ourselves and our children for an economy in which all the familiar rules have been broken. It is required reading for executives and front-line workers, for students and investors, for everyone who wants to be prepared for the new world that is at our doorstep.