If managing were simple, why do the majority of businesses fail? If physicians had the same success rate as executives, the medical schools would have been shuttered long ago.

To succeed at re-engineering, you have to be a missionary, a motivator, and a leg breaker.

Reengineering eliminates work, not jobs or people.

Automating a mess yields an automated mess.

Reengineering cannot be entrusted to the semi-competent, the hangers-on with nothing better to do.

Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer.

...heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results - largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business...Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over.