Who Has the Next Big Idea?

By now, as he explains all of this to a crowd of mostly middle-aged middle managers from Middle America, Hammer is seething. He points to the woman -- like all of the figures on the slide, she is a cheesy drawing that had been culled from some clip-art package. He points to an arrow running from her to the engineer; this represents her handing off the specs. Then to an arrow between the engineer and a mailbox. Then to an arrow connecting the mailbox to a tooling plant. Then to an arrow showing the tooling plant handing off the item to a manufacturing plant.

The auto-parts company was consistent, Hammer thunders: "Consistently lousy!" It always took 140 days -- "that's 20 weeks!" -- to get a decent sample to a customer. Its main competitor could do the task in six weeks. Enamored of time-consuming, buck-passing, value-draining "sequential activities," the auto-parts company was winning only 18% of its bids.

"In my bible," Hammer booms, "it says that the love of hand-offs is the root of all evil!"

But the congregants already know there's a better way, a truer path. That's what they've come to hear. Many of them represent huge companies you've never heard of -- one is a guy from an industrial gas company that has no consumer products, no high-profile branding, no corporate hallways with magazine covers featuring its executives' self-satisfied smirks. All it has is $5.5 billion in annual sales and 17,500 employees. He, like the others in the ballroom this morning, seems to get goose bumps every time he hears "supply-chain management." He, like nearly everyone in the crowd, is white. He, like two-thirds of the audience, is male. Whoever has the Dockers and golf-shirt concessions here is making a bundle.

Hammer strides from one side of the room to the other, up and down the aisles, telling his tale of redemption. Once the auto-parts company found religion -- that is, once it hired Hammer at a rate upwards of $70,000 per day -- it changed its act. It eliminated waste. It reorganized activities. The woman from sales and the man from engineering began seeing the client together to grasp more clearly the client's needs. The company began storing all of its previous designs on the engineers' workstations -- which shrunk the design stage from three days to a few minutes. Instead of mailing the designs to the tooling plant, the engineers zapped them there electronically. And if the tooling plant was busy, the company took that task to another plant, rather than wait. By reforming each stage, the auto-parts company had more time for refinements and revisions to suit the customer. And the payoff was dramatic. The 140-day timeline shrunk to 18 days. Overhead costs dropped by 50%. And the company went from winning roughly one out of five bids to capturing four out of five.

The audience is mesmerized.

Hammer follows with another tale of redemption: a company that used process reengineering to square its invoices with its purchase orders. To drive home the point, he deploys the call-and-response technique of a Baptist preacher.

"Process management is . . ." Hammer says, his rising intonation beckoning the audience to respond.

"Uh-wee-uh-lye," the crowd mumbles in what sounds like a lost language of Hawaii.

"Say it loud, and say it proud!" Hammer screams. "Process management is ..."

"A way of life!" the crowd responds.

"Process management," Hammer repeats, calmly this time, "is a way of life."

Somebody says, "Amen."

Coming Soon: The Next Book of Hammer

Eight years after his megabook, Hammer is still megaphoning the need for processes. Obsessing over processes, getting them right -- no, getting them perfect -- is the only way a company can survive, especially now that the new economy has left early childhood and has grown into gangly, unpredictable adolescence.

Yet for someone who preaches change, Hammer's own life seems remarkably stable. He arrived in Cambridge as a 16-year-old MIT freshman. Essentially, he never left. When he graduated, he stayed at MIT to earn a doctorate. Then he stuck around for 10 more years as a professor of computer science. He launched Hammer and Company in 1982.

And though he's been a businessman for nearly 20 years, Hammer ("Dr. Hammer" to his staff and admirers) retains a certain professorial quality. He is simultaneously owlish and bearish. If Reengineering the Corporation -- the clarion call to the business revolution -- was the Declaration of Independence, then his new book, The Agenda, is the Articles of Confederation: more pragmatic, less evangelical, a plan of action rather than a cri de coeur. "Ten years ago, people needed waking up," Hammer says. "They don't need waking up anymore. The tenor of conversation among companies today is quite different from what it was a decade ago."