Word: hammerism
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...should and should not be on the list [TIME 25, June 17]. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about people such as William Julius Wilson and Stephen Covey. I was glad to see Robert Redford and Toni Morrison included. I even thought the controversial choices, like Louis Farrakhan and Michael Hammer, were O.K. too. They certainly are influential today. ELAINE PONDANT Carrollton, Texas...
...many ways, enriched our work life, to which a cynic might respond, "Sure, if you're still working." Michael Hammer calls his lifework "undoing the Industrial Revolution." And it has been keeping him busy. Hammer, 48, is the originator and flamekeeper of a business concept called "re-engineering," a term he coined in a book he co-wrote in 1993 called Reengineering the Corporation...
...Hammer's philosophy does not refer to adjusting the knobs on the machinery. Reengineering is radical. It means starting with a clean sheet--if you were going to begin making and selling cars or magazines today, how would you go about it as opposed to how you are doing it now? The answers set in motion a revolution the likes of which hadn't been seen since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line. Like most revolutions, this one has been extremely messy. Such huge firms as Procter & Gamble, Xerox and American Standard have successfully taken a Hammer to their structures...
...same time, re-engineering has become synonymous with less elegant forms of reorganization, notably downsizing, in which CEOs fire workers wholesale to make a company more "efficient." It can be the management equivalent of cutting off a leg of the chair you are sitting on to save wood. Says Hammer: "It is astonishing to me the extent to which the term re-engineering has been hijacked, misappropriated and misunderstood." He says the goal isn't to eliminate people. Rather, re-engineering makes what they do more valuable and rewarding. The catch: a re-engineered company initially requires fewer workers. Ideally...
...Hammer, who lives in Newton, Massachusetts, came to his idea the long way. An electrical engineer and a former M.I.T. computer-science professor, he gradually became more interested in what people were doing than in computers. In his forthcoming book, Beyond Reengineering, he attacks the corporate focus on doing "tasks"--making part of a car, say, or doing a credit check. To him, the key to value-creating work is mastering "process," or how bits of work that form a product or service come together. Says he: "I think this is the work of the angels. In a world where...