Reengineering.

The rapidly changing economy of the 1990s demanded that companies large and small alter their modes of operation. The first popular managerial fad of the decade was known as "reengineering." James Champy, cofounder of the consulting firm CSC Index, and Michael Hammer, an electrical engineer and former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), conceived of "reengineering" and brought it to international prominence. Champy and Hammer defined the concept as "the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed." Central to reengineering is the tenet that companies identify their essential activities and processes, and then make them as efficient as possible. Operations or individuals on the periphery, therefore, had to be discarded. Reengineering thus provided the theoretical rationale for much of the corporate...