Product Description

The 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #241499 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-09
• Released on: 2001-10-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
"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 Rothman

From Publishers Weekly
While suppliers once dominated their customers because the latter were competing for scarce goods, now, with the late 20th-century's increase in production capacity, "sellers have become supplicants for scarce buyers." In his fourth book, Hammer (Reengineering the Corporation) heralds the arrival of the new "customer economy," exhorting corporations everywhere to prepare for it by implementing his agenda. Each of the nine chapters devoted to business innovation principles diagnoses a corporate disease, offers a cure, provides brief case histories of companies undergoing treatment and summarizes what the reader should remember when attempting to remedy his own company. But this quick and occasionally entertaining read is often superficial: a chapter describing the power of the Internet to break down intercorporate barriers fails to answer basic questions about vulnerabilities assumed by companies outsourcing essential business functions or sharing information. His broad subjects require corporate case studies to provide needed detail; instead, the reader is offered anecdotes. And exhortations like "to create a customer-centered company, everyone... will have to work extra hard, learn new skills, cope with unfamiliar problems, and in general rise to the occasion" are unhelpful. Nor are Hammer's assumptions always realistic: constructing powerful computer interfaces to help customers help themselves is not the low-cost, complete customer service panacea Hammer claims it to be. After all, readers familiar with automated phone-navigation systems or customer service links replaced by FAQ links on Web sites may wonder where the "customer economy" concept really exists in practice.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Innovation in customer service is the main reason for the current wave of corporate prosperity, according to the author who wrote the bestseller REENGINEERING THE CORPORATION. He says that companies used to be difficult to do business with because of the bad habits of "old economy" organizational models. Today, it's all focused on customers and what they perceive will improve their lives. This requires putting more emphasis on fitting products to their needs and integrating company functions better to see and service those needs. It's an intuitive answer to the challenge of demanding and fickle customers who are obsessed with squeezing the last ounce of value out of their business transactions. T.W. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Hammer is the Master
Dr. Hammer is deservedly the master of process change. His books give a good overview of his concepts, and serve as an effective evaluation of what you can achieve by following his methods. However, I found that his training courses are the best way to get the training required to implement his approach. My profession is business transformation, and Dr. Hammer is the model I primarily use in my work. There are many tools available (and required) to achieve and sustain effective business change, but Hammer is my primary guide. If you are involved in transforming your company, Dr. Hammer is the place to begin. After that, Balanced Scorecard, Open Innovation, and all the other standard tools will fit into place.

spot on!
I read this book upon its release and as a business consultant and entrepreneur I have found Hammer to be "spot on" as usual. Great book!

The Agenda
The same with this book. The shipping, packaging, and timely delivery could not have been better.