Remembering Michael Hammer

"Success begins by determining whether you are the kind of person with the stuff of success -- and if you are not, transforming yourself into someone who is."

--Michael Hammer, Beyond Reengineering, 1996

It often takes years for people to look at an emerging technology and “get it right” when framing the economic and social implications. What is amazing about Michael Hammer, who tragically died in an accident August 22nd, is that he got it right just as the new technology was being born.

In computing’s monolithic era -- before ERP and the Web -- technology was more about doing things more efficiently, not necessarily differently. The new technologies were powerful precisely because they were more about moving the cow paths than about simply paving them. His call to re-engineer the corporation was the perfect construct with which to communicate that message to those actually writing the checks.


It would have been all well and good to call for a process orientation that cuts across functional silos -- but until the means existed to do that in a way that was scalable, it wasn’t going to happen. It’s a legitimate question whether the massive technology investments of the 1990s would have occurred at all had it not been for the popularization of re-engineering among non-technical audiences.

Talk about connecting the dots. Hammer’s contribution wasn’t simply a translation of bits and bytes to dollars and cents. He gave the new technologies an emotional edge. Re-engineering brought the feel of a movement into forums not known before or (sadly) since for embracing “revolution.” He will be missed.