Reengineering Is Very Much Like Sex

Sex Sells!

For reasons too complicated to explain, even to myself, I’ve been doing a lot of clearing out of the “underbrush” in my office over the last couple of weeks.  Some of this was absolutely essential because the physical piles of papers that will never be read, the files of long gone clients, the insights notes whose sources are lost in the mists, and all the other detritius of a busy professional life that started way before it was possible to go all electronic were propagating.  I could no longer find quickly the really important things, and every available inch of my very generous counters were overflowing.   

But some of this clearing out was also about clearing out the “underbrush” in my too full brain to make room for new ideas, people, vendors, clients, deliverables, object model considerations, etc.  Your brain may be much younger than mine and, perhaps, less full, but I know that there’s no more room in mine unless I periodically delete and defrag.  

The best part of these periodic clean-outs are the gems I find lurking at the bottom of folders or tucked into a pile on some totally unrelated topic.  This particular gem is the set of 3×5 cards (do they still make them?) I used for a speech I gave at then HRSP’s (predecessor to IHRIM) national conference in 1992.  For those of you too young to remember the reengineering craze, just substituted the latest equivalent — tranformation!  Direct to you from across the decades are these words to live by, exactly as they are hand-written on those 3×5 cards.   

Reengineering is very much like sex:

• Everybody’s talking about it;

• Few are really actively engaged;

• And very few are really best-in-class;

• It’s hard to do well;

• It’s so easy to find an excuse not to get started;

• There are no performance standards and failure to perform (once you get started) is ego-threatening;

• We start with good instincts, but they’re “discouraged” by our training;

• So what are we to do?

PRACTICE MAKES BETTER!  There’s no substitute for experience.  But make sure you obtain informed consent up front.

Note:   Michael Hammer’s seminal 1990 article in the Harvard Business Review was the launch point for this management concept, for reengineering, and I was an early adopter for HRM and the HRM delivery system.  He was younger than me and died way too young in 2008, but I think he would have loved the use to which I put his concepts in my 1992 speech.