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"Suddenly," writes Michael Hammer in the opening to his confidently but aptly named new book The Agenda, "business is not so easy anymore." He then sets out an ambitious plan for righting what many businesses are doing wrong, much as he did a decade ago in his bestselling Reengineering the Corporation. This time, however, he retreats from the overarching "big idea" promulgated in his earlier book to present a system that incorporates nine ideas geared for an environment where customers really do rule. Hammer unveils these aligned-but-individual ideas, which relate to process and customer orientation, along with measurement, management, connecting via the Net, and eventual positioning as "components of virtually extended enterprises" rather than "self-contained wholes." He goes on to explain why they represent improvements over past procedures and cites examples of them in practice. (While discussing measurement, for instance, he shows why most companies use their carefully compiled statistics for little more than affirming what has already happened; he then tells how one firm matched fixed goals in customer retention, employee retention, and product distribution with actual performance requirements that could be tracked and changed.) The final two chapters offer specific implementation suggestions, all filtered through the eyes of an engineer who never went to business school and peppers his writing with references to the Grateful Dead and the Jack Palance character in City Slickers. In all, another provocative and practical tract that will surely attract old fans as well as new believers. --Howard RothmanThe agenda: nine powerful and practical business ideas for today’s world of fierce competitors and even fiercer customers.These are tough times for business. Pressures from all sides are greater than ever. The old solutions don’t work anymore, and the silver bullets of the late 1990s have proven to be hollow. Serious businesspeople know there is no simple solution, no single answer. They need a whole tool kit of new ideas and new techniques. That’s what The Agenda delivers.Michael Hammer, author of Reengineering the Corporation, the defining business book of the 1990s, has uncovered the secrets of today’s best companies. He has worked long and hard to identify how these companies consistently out-execute their competitors, and he reveals what he has learned in The Agenda. This breakthrough book spells out an action plan for the twenty-first century. Here’s a sampling:* Make life easy for your customers. Your customers’ biggest gripe is not that your products are bad, but that it is too tough to order, receive, and pay for them. In short, you are a royal pain to do business with. You need to take a hard look at how you operate from your customers’ point of view and redesign how you work to save them time, money, and frustration. In other words, run your business for their convenience, not yours.* Become a process fanatic. Process is the Clark Kent of business ideas. Seemingly mild and unassuming, process is a revolutionary way of thinking about work in customer terms. It blows away overhead and cost, confusion and delay. It is the discipline that makes outstanding performance a matter of design rather than luck. Process is the way to make both customers and shareholders happy and to keep them that way on a sustained basis.* Measure like you mean it. Most business measurements are worthless. They tell you what happened in the past (sort of), but offer few if any clues about how to make things better in the future. To come up with useful measurements, you need to create a model of your business that ties overall goals to the things you actually control. You need to measure these (and only these) things carefully and base your actions on what you learn. Measure to improve, not just to measure. * Don’t just talk teamwork–live it. You expect teamwork and cooperation from the front lines, and you need to demand the same from yourself and your colleagues. The days of the proudly independent business manager running a sharply defined unit are over. * Link companies together through the Internet. Break down the walls that separate you from other companies, walls that create huge amounts of inefficiency and overhead. Change your distribution channel from a series of resellers into a community that works together to serve the final customer. Redesign your operations in tandem with those of your suppliers and customers. Stop seeing yourself as a self-contained unit that creates a product on its own, and get used to the idea of virtually integrating with others.The Agenda will forever change the way you think about business.
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