Was Michael Hammer A Lean Business Guru?

The name of Dr. Michael Hammer is generally not associated with lean. But as a business author and guru who focused on ways to improve companies, his work should be of interest to lean advocates.

And with the news that Hammer died of a brain hemorrhage this week at the age of 60, perhaps now is an appropriate time to talk about him.

Hammer is best known as co-author, with James Champy, of Re-Engineering the Corporation, an influential business book published in 1993 that spent 41 weeks on the best-seller lists of The New York Times.

I never read the book, although I did hear Hammer speak once. I was impressed by his intelligence and his concepts. The speech was a good number of years ago, before I became a lean devotee.

According to the obituary in The New York Times, the book

promoted the idea of simplifying and reorganizing business departments by having the workers break down their activities into logical, bite-size pieces, then take a “clean sheet” approach to reassembling their work for greater efficiency and productivity…

Stephen P. Kaufman, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, said in an interview Thursday that after the book’s release, “there was a large flurry of re-engineering projects, led both by consulting firms that would teach the process to companies and by the companies themselves.” Mr. Kaufman added that he “would not quite call it a revolution, but a very useful tool in the tool bag of effective managers.”

Time magazine saw it differently — and laced with an element of controversy.
In its 1996 profile of Dr. Hammer, it said his book “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.”

“At the same time,” the profile continued, “re-engineering has become synonymous with less elegant forms of reorganization, notably downsizing, in which C.E.O.’s fire workers wholesale to make a company more ‘efficient.’ ”

Dr. Hammer and Mr. Champy were deeply concerned about the misuse of their premise.

“It is astonishing to me the extent to which the term re-engineering has been hijacked, misappropriated and misunderstood,” Dr. Hammer told Time, saying that ideally, re-engineering should promote greater production and create more jobs.

It sounds as if Hammer’s concepts and lean concepts have some elements in common.

Have any of you ever worked at a company that applied Hammer’s re-engineering concepts? What was your experience? And do those concepts contain elements of lean? We look forward to your comments.