Michael Hammer, Author, President - Hammer and Company

Michael Hammer was brought in for the SDM Alumni Conference and I was looking forward to it. He is well-known for having authored several popular management books including The Reengineering Revolution and most recently The Agenda. He was very animated and his talk was interactive. He said he'll send out his preso so we didn't need to write down everything on his slides. He quoted Immanuel Kant: a lecture is when the professor's notes become the students' notes without passing through the heads of either. He said he didn't want his talk to be a lecture.

Michael Hammer's bio

Notes:

He's a big fan of the SDM program

Spends his time with large organizations discussing structure, process and organizational change, which is kind of funny because he has no training in these areas

He has 3 degrees from MIT and was on the Course 6 faculty for 12 yrs

He's giving us 2 days worth of material in 1.5 hours

There is a lot of opportunity to apply engineering thinking to non-engineering domains (which have no laws, equations, theorems, etc.)

An engineering mindset is exactly what is needed to address large ambiguous systems (like organizations)

He doesn't know much about product or technological innovation, but he does know about operational innovation

What one surprising thing does Dell, Southwest, Toyota, and Wal-Mart have in common? Operational innovation; no product innovation

They aren't innovative in what they sell, but instead how they sell it. This is operational innovation.

He calls himself an Industrial Engineer - a designer of "work"

Doesn't consider himself a management guru

Peter Drucker once told him that they only call people gurus because it is shorter than charlatan

Most people tend to think about enterprises in terms of organizations or finances

Most people use the word "process" in the wrong way

Process means end-to-end work

There are a half dozen or so major processes in all organizations even if you don't know it

Many processes are invisible/implicit and were never "designed"

When you define them, you can design them

Likes to tell people he is reversing the industrial revolution

Specialization of work was good in the 1800s, but is a really bad idea now

Instead of a lot of small jobs, have a few big jobs that fit together nicely

Moving to this isn't easy because "nobody likes change except wet babies"

The Process Approach to Performance Improvement (see slides)

Real "assets" of a company are intangible: brand, knowledge, processes, etc. It is not people because they go home everyday and may not come back.

When Wal-Mart goes to Germany, they don't take patents or even brand, they take their processes

Process has a bad name because most are way over controlled