Michael Hammer
Crown Business
New York, New York
2001, 269 pages, $27.50 Only $19.25 at
Amazon.com
By Henry Holtzman
Early in his book, Dr. Hammer
refers to a story told about Albert Einstein. Einstein’s secretary reminds
him that the exam he has prepared for his students is the same one he gave
the previous year, and the students would recognize the questions. Einstein
replied that “even though the questions were all the same, the answers had
changed.”
True or not, the story
foreshadows the remainder of the book.
As Hammer points out:
“What is true of physics is true
of business. Today’s business world is not that of Peter Drucker or of Tom
Peters and Bob Waterman, and it calls for a new edition of the management
agenda.
The mission of this book is to set it forth.
The entire point of “The Agenda”
is to set out where business management should be going during the first 10
years of the new millennium. Managing a business while industry is changing
on a global scale isn’t easy, but as the author notes, managing a business
at any time has always been difficult and risky. Innovative factors such as
inexpensive computerization and international competition may have fueled
the high times of the 1990s, but there is nothing new about surplus capacity
and the search for lower overhead. Hammer states:
“This then is the real ‘new
economy.’ It did not begin in 1995, it has little to do with the Internet,
and it certainly does not require pretentious capitalization. It is the
customer economy, which has been growing and gathering steam for the last 25
years. The circumstances that have driven the customer economy are not yet
played out; indeed, they are accelerating. There is no foreseeable end to
increases in global competition, overcapacity, commoditization, or customer
knowledge, or to the customer power that flows from them.”
Hammer goes on to note that it
was a revolution in business management that fueled the boom times that
began in the late 1980s, not the Internet or policies of the U.S. Federal
Reserve. He correctly notes that a … “Rip Van Winkle who had fallen asleep
in the 1970s and awoke today would not recognize the business world.”
Certainly the biggest single change has been the customer-driven
marketplace, regardless of whether the customer is part of the general
consumer group or one of Fortune’s 500.
Most of “The Agenda” takes a
closer look of the management methods of operating which impact business
results. Two of these he notes as acronyms, ETDBW and MVA. The first stands
for making your business Easy To Do Business With and the
latter is translated as More Value Added. Hammer defines the difference
between this way:
“ETDBW means that you continue to give the
customer what you always have but in a more convenient way. MVA means that
you give the customer more, perhaps far more than you ever have before. It
goes beyond simplifying your customers’ interactions with you to delivering
solutions to your customers’ problems, of which your products and services
in their native forms are but small pieces.”
At the heart of the book dealing
with the customer-driven markets is a very basic concept, one that was used
with great effectiveness during the 1950s by IBM. It’s best expressed by the
maxim that, “People don’t buy products or services … they buy solutions to
their problems.”
In many ways “The Agenda” may be
the best of Dr. Hammer’s books.
It is certainly among the easiest to read and
best organized. He finally clears up a weak point in his other books by
noting that he does not devalue the way a company creates its product or
service, often called its “process … or the “related activities that
together create a result of value to customers.” He believes that without
process there is chaos, but process that doesn’t consider the needs of
customers is equally chaotic.
“The Agenda” should be required
reading for senior and mid-level managers who aspire to executive offices.
It’s not a step-by-step blueprint, but a way of analyzing business issues in
the 21st Century.
