Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.

Michael Hammer and James Champy's Reengineering the Corporation has been the past year's major management best seller, and on the strength of its success Hammer, a former business professor at MIT, has emerged as one of America's hot new management gurus, jetting hither and yon to talk to conclaves of corporate executives for daily fees running into five figures. The book offers an interesting glimpse of the state of the big corporation in the '90s and of the management doctors who tend to its ills.

Hammer and Champy style themselves radicals. The traditional big corporation is dead, they argue. The principles it rested on--the division of labor and hierarchical control--have been invalidated by new competition and information technology, and if the General Electrics and Citicorps and Procter & Gambles want to survive, they must transform themselves into substantially hierarchical, self-managing networks of teams avid to serve the customer, beat the competition, and embrace change. In effect, the authors argue, the big corporation must recast itself in the image of the traditional small firm.

Reengineering the corporation, the authors argue, means ceasing to think in terms of jobs and objectives and other such traditional management concepts and starting to think in terms of "process." The entire "work process" must be re conceived and restructured, with everything up for grabs and nothing taken as a given. Reengineering requires strong leadership from the top. It empowers people at the bottom.

As for what specifically an executive could do to implement Hammer and Champy's program at his company, the book is curiously silent. To be sure, it describes the experiences of some well-known companies that have reengineered themselves. It lists mistakes often made by firms trying to take the reengineering cure. It describes the benefits of the process. But the case studies are superficial and the lists are short. Both enthusiasts who want to go ahead with the authors' program and skeptics who want more information are left with little choice but to call Hammer and Champy's offices and arrange for an in-person consultation, suitably compensated of course.

In other words, behind the authors' professed radicalism, there is--nothing much. The authors' advice is so general, so far removed from real life and practical experience, so anxious to avoid giving offense, so desirous of making a good impression as to be almost totally devoid of practical value. Telling a CEO at IBM or G.M., as Hammer and Champy effectively do, to "be radical" or "start with a clean sheet of paper" without getting down to cases is about as useful as advising him, as a way of improving his relationships with subordinates, to "be a good listener."

The Polonius-to-Laertes-style homilies, in the context in which Hammer and Champy present them, are not just unhelpful, they're positively pernicious. At the core of the plight of the big corporation these days is a powerful capacity to deny painful truths, tell comforting lies, and thereby make it possible for business as usual to go forward even as everyone gives lip service to the idea that they're finally facing up to reality and putting a bad old dysfunctional past behind them. With its glib generality, Hammer and Champy's best seller is a recipe for precisely such a defense of business as usual.