"The genesis of reengineering lies in a phrase one of us coined in the late 1980s: “Automating a mess yields an automated mess.” Unless an organization reconceptualized its operations, overlaying new technology on these operations accomplished little."

“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.”

“Sadly, we must report that despite the success stories described in previous chapters, many companies that begin reengineering don’t succeed at it... Our unscientific estimate is that as many as 50 to 70 percent of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.”

“Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed.”

“Reengineering cannot be planned meticulously and accomplished in small and cautious steps. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition with an uncertain result.”

“To succeed at reengineering, you have to be a missionary, a motivator, and a leg breaker.”

“Despite a decade or more of restructuring and downsizing, many U.S. companies are still unprepared to operate in the 1990s. In a time of rapidly changing technologies and ever-shorter product life cycles, product development often proceeds at a glacial pace. In an age of the customer, order fulfillment has high error rates and customer inquiries go unanswered for weeks. In a period when asset utilization is critical, inventory levels exceed many months of demand.”