Thanks for the comment. Good points. I love the line: BPR was just the organizational equivalent of brain transplant surgery?almost all risk with a low probability of any reward (let alone a reward sufficient to justify the damage done while removing the old brain).

Michelle

In case your readers don’t follow the comment thread at the HBR blog site, I’d like to share my comment on Jim Heskett’s article and the subsequent comments:

“As a practitioner in the organizational performance field (including process design and continuous improvement), I remember looking with more than a little interest at Hammer’s concept of BPR. In the end, though, I decided that BPR was just the organizational equivalent of brain transplant surgery–almost all risk with a low probability of any reward (let alone a reward sufficient to justify the damage done while removing the old brain). The consequent BPR disasters of the early 90s confirm that assessment (despite the BPR supporters who protest, “But if only those projects had been done correctly…”).

“It occurs to me that the reason BPR sounded tenable is that most managers and executives who committed to it really didn’t know how to identify a capable process, let alone design one. Consequently, they came to the conclusion that the only solution to incapable processes was to totally start over (and throw a lot of technology into the mix, since that was the route to the future).

“Do you see the analogy? If you don’t understand what makes a hierarchy capable, your first choice of fixing your organization design is to throw out the hierarchy and go with something else, rather than making the hierarchy capable.

“Good luck with that.”