One on One with Strategist and Author Jim Champy

Twenty years ago, Jim Champy co-authored one of the most influential business books of all time. Re-engineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution sold more than 3 million copies and spent more than a year on The New York Times Best Seller list. The ideas in that book fueled the growth of many advisory firms, and indeed the entire consulting profession. Two decades later, Champy says those ideas are more important than ever. The reason? At a time when companies must now be more agile and responsive to market demands, many companies, in all sectors, find themselves frozen in the complexity of their technology and process… once again. So, what can we do about it? Champy will lay out his executive roadmap as part of his highly anticipated "Re-engineering Revisited: Why It's More Important Now Than Ever Before" presentation at the Consulting Summit in New York on Oct. 25. Champy recently sat down with Consulting One on One to discuss re-engineering's role today.

Consulting: So, how does re-engineering as you defined it two decades ago apply to today?

Champy: The book was originally published in 1993 but we developed many of the concepts in the late 1980s. The fundamental ideas are still very valid and important. In fact, I could argue that they are more important today than when we first introduced them. Re-engineering, while it benefited many companies, was also a phenomenon that was widely misunderstood by many companies that simply used it as an excuse to downsize rather than fundamentally changing the nature and process of work. We intended re-engineering to be around the fundamental redesign of work. But there were many companies that didn't understand that; or they did understand it but just used the label to apply the label to any restructuring they were doing. The end result was fewer people doing more work. Eventually that led to the degradation of service and that was very unhealthy. Consulting: What was the core premise of the book?