Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer.

...heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results - largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business...Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over.

If managing were simple, why do the majority of businesses fail? If physicians had the same success rate as executives, the medical schools would have been shuttered long ago.

Automating a mess yields an automated mess.

America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth.

Reengineering cannot be entrusted to the semi-competent, the hangers-on with nothing better to do.

Unless companies change these rules, any superficial re-organizations they perform will be no more effective than dusting the furniture in Pompeii.

Reengineering eliminates work, not jobs or people.

The transitional concept of management is reaching the end of the road.

To succeed at re-engineering, you have to be a missionary, a motivator, and a leg breaker.