I had been ready to deal with an impossibly busy and impatient person with evangelical zeal–even someone like the hardboiled Mike Hammer that Mickey Spillane had created. Hammer was the most un-hammer like person I have ever met. He followed up a 1999 article on How Process Enterprises Really Work with The Superefficient Company in 2001, which showed executives how to make cross-company processes more efficient, and in 2004, he described how enterprises could create innovative business processes in Deep Change: How Operational Innovation Can Transform Your Company. Hammer had been building on his work by writing for HBR, on average, every three years. Michael Hammer! I quickly made my pitch above the engine’s roar and before the trip ended, I had landed a chance to work with the master guru of process. One evening, as we hurtled around in an auto-rickshaw–the three-wheeled vehicle everyone in the city uses–I saw my boss looking at his Blackberry and saying something about a new proposal from Hammer.

Twelve years later, I was in Delhi but visiting from Boston, where I now worked for Harvard Business Review. Hammer quickly became a local legend although like all prophets, he drew as much criticism as praise in his homeland. India’s economy was then opening up to foreign competition, and CEO after CEO in the mid-1990s extolled the virtues of business process reengineering. Importantly, they were among the first to predict that instead of control and efficiency, every business process–such as the sequence of steps from accepting an order to fulfilling it–would have to focus on innovation and speed in the future. Companies should redefine the way they do things instead of using computers to replicate inefficient processes, argued Hammer and co-author James Champy, who now heads Perot Systems’ consulting practice. I needn’t have worried, though the first book co-authored by Michael Hammer–who passed away in Boston on September 4, 2008–lived up to the hype.

Its title, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, left me cold initially I had OD-ed on the word revolution for too long. In December 1993, a book smelling like new arrived at my worktable in Delhi, India.

Michael hammer james champy