Reengineering didn't start out as a code word for mindless bloodshed. It wasn't supposed to be the last gasp of Industrial Age management. I know because I was there from the beginning. I was one of the "creators."

Of course, the real creators of reengineering weren't consultants or academics. They were real people with real problems to fix. Inside companies like Ford, Hewlett-Packard, and Mutual Benefit Life, managers were experimenting with new uses of information technology to link processes that cut across functional boundaries. But they didn't call their work reengineering; they didn't have elaborate "change models"; they certainly didn't see a movement in the making. All that came later.

The other thing to remember about the start of reengineering is that the phrase "massive layoffs" was never part of the early vocabulary. Ford certainly got credit for reducing headcount in its accounts payable department by 75% - one of the earliest examples of the new technology meeting business practices. But those workers were reassigned within the company. When I wrote about "business process redesign" in 1990, I explicitly said that using it for cost reduction alone was not a sensible goal. And consultants Michael Hammer and James Champy, the two names most closely associated with reengineering, have insisted all along that layoffs shouldn't be the point. But the fact is, once out of the bottle, the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly.

So ugly that today, to most businesspeople in the United States, reengineering has become a word that stands for restructuring, layoffs, and too-often failed change programs. At a recent Boston forum, in fact, Michael Hammer gathered a group of business journalists to explore why reengineering had become such a tainted term.

The rock that reengineering has foundered on is simple: people. Reengineering treated the people inside companies as if they were just so many bits and bytes, interchangable parts to be reengineered. But no one wants to "be reengineered." No one wants to hear dictums like, "Carry the wounded but shoot the stragglers" - language that makes workers feel like prisoners of war, not their company's most important assets. No one wants to see 25-year-old MBAs in their first year of consulting making $80,000 per year with $30,000 signing bonuses, being billed out at six times their salaries, putting the company's veterans through their paces like they're just another group of idiots who "can't think out of the box."

The 1994 CSC Index "State of Reengineering Report" had the answer: 50% of the companies that participated in the study reported that the most difficult part of reengineering is dealing with fear and anxiety in their organizations; 73% of the companies said that they were using reengineering to eliminate, on average, 21% of the jobs; and, of 99 completed reengineering initiatives, 67% were judged as producing mediocre, marginal, or failed results.

Now, in the United States at least, the reengineering fever has broken. Consulting firms that relied too heavily on reengineering and grew too fast are desperately retrenching. Companies that embraced it as the silver bullet are now looking for ways to rebuild the organization's torn social fabric. But before we dismiss it as just a fad, it's worth taking one last look - or perhaps one first honest look. Was reengineering always such a destructive management concept? How did a good idea go off the tracks so badly? And once the overblown claims have passed, what of value will remain?