New Word City: The Business School for Busy People

The conflated claims of some business “gurus” are inherently suspect; one who wasn’t, the late and much missed Michael Hammer, also would not have been surprised by our global financial meltdown and Great Recession. Mike, co-author of the seminal book Reengineering the Corporation, saw it coming.

My biggest pleasure in being founder and CEO of New Word City is the lively minds we connect with, and Mike was one of the liveliest. We worked with him and Jim Champy on Reengineering the Corporation, and on Mike’s three subsequent books, and he changed the way I see the world with his central insight — that business is about much more than money. In fact, he said, it’s the world’s biggest creative force.

We all lost a lot when Mike died less than two years ago. He was only 60, and he was a long way from being done with either learning or teaching — two activities he was extraordinarily good at. Mike was the quintessential outsider, a self-styled misfit who revolutionized business without ever having gone to business school. He disrupted complacency with his seemingly simple questions — mostly asking, “Why?” Real change, he held, can come only from people who haven’t bought into the received wisdom. “It’s hard,” he wrote, “to think outside the box when you’re stuck inside it.”

I’ll never forget his endless curiosity, the way he peppered questions at everyone he met. That included the audiences he captivated with his quick wit and the seminars he conducted, taking notes with any of a large array of pens spread out on the table. When he wasn’t speaking or conducting seminars, he dove into his thoughts; he was an intensely private man, the son of Holocaust survivors, a rabbinical student who came to consulting by way of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and computer science. He was devoted to his wife, Phyllis, and his four children.

In 1993, Reengineering the Corporation taught us that businesses shouldn’t be collections of walled-up divisions at war with each other, but colleagues collaborating with each other — and also with their customers and suppliers. The book spent 41 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and made Mike a business celebrity. But that was only the beginning of his insights. We’ll never know where they would have taken him, and us.

But we do know what he thought about the mindset that led to the crash. “When money is deemed the root of all good, bad things happen,” he wrote. Money is a useful yardstick, but “Businesses driven primarily by money have values that are small, mean, and desiccated.” A company that neglects investment to fatten the next quarter’s profit is actually destroying shareholder value, and “The casino we call the stock market has become the very short tail that wags the very big business dog.”

Seen properly, Mike said, business is a noble endeavor that produces new products and jobs, wealth, a sense of purpose, and actual happiness. He quoted Walter Bagehot, founding editor of The Economist: “Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously and more deeply.” Mike added, “Without the vital creative force of business, our world would be impoverished beyond reckoning.”

Somehow, in the past 20 years, we lost sight of those truths. Mike never did, and I’m glad I knew him.