The rough patch we have had for the past couple of years is only going to continue. Michael Hammer’s brilliance was especially acute during tough times when people in business had to hunker down and just be plain better than the competition. His focus was on the nuts-and-bolts of how work actually gets done, showing people how to transform a business by improving the way it is run-whether it’s a factory or a software company. While he worked with CEOs, much of his life was spent two and three levels down, with people who run refineries, develop new pharmaceuticals, make the packaging for food products, market financial services, deliver health care, or develop software. Hammer’s mantra was, “My job isn’t to tell people what business they should be in, that’s up to them. I simply tell them how to do it best-whether it’s something as complex as software or as simple as widgets, and that means doing it differently.”
The central problem Hammer saw is that despite good intentions, companies don’t perform at the levels they need to because the way they do things is screwed up. This book is a tool kit for how to do things right, providing its listeners with the skills to make deep and fundamental changes in how companies do their work.
Given the range of people and the types of companies Hammer worked with, Faster Cheaper Better will benefit a wide range of people. It includes those at the top as well as middle managers and business professionals. Its focus on operations and process make it the ideal book not only for those who run a factory, refinery, or the customer service operation of a bank, but also people and companies engaged in creative activities-such as book publishers, software companies, and pharmaceutical firms.

No business concept was more important to America’s economic revival in the 1990s than reengineering — introduced to the world in Michael Hammer and James Champy’s Reengineering the Corporation. Already a classic, this international bestseller describes how the radical redesign of a company’s processes, organization, and culture can achieve a quantum leap in performance.

But if you think that reengineering once was enough, think again. More changes, more challenges are coming in the twenty-first century. Now Hammer and Champy have updated and revised their milestone work for the New Economy they helped to create — promising to help corporations save hundreds of millions of dollars more, raise their customer satisfaction still higher, and grow ever more nimble in the years to come.

New rules for the new game:
the ideas that every business needs to win in the customer economy

In The Agenda, Michael Hammer shows companies how to prosper in today’s world of slow growth, fierce competition, and enormously powerful customers. The winners in this extraordinarily difficult environment—companies like IBM, Duke Power, Progressive Insurance, and GE—succeed through superior operations. Their costs are lower and their quality higher than their competitors’; they get new products to market faster and they provide better customer service. How do they do it? Through near-fanatical attention to the basics of business, and by managing these basics in new and creative ways.

The Agenda teaches the ideas and techniques that any company—large or small, service firm or manufacturer—can use to out-execute and out-innovate its competitors. Businesses that follow these principles will grow by taking market share away from those that do not. While others decline, your company can thrive. The Agenda will show you how.