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.

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.

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.

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

America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth.

Reengineering eliminates work, not jobs or people.

Automating a mess yields an automated mess.