"Observing and performing the process is the best way to develop insight into it. However, the team must be vigilant about avoiding the temptation to overstudy. The goal must be to move quickly to redesign. Before concluding we should comment on another tool that is available to reengineering teams, namely benchmarking. Essentially, benchmarking means looking for the companies that are doing something best and learning how they do it in order to emulate them... Used this way, benchmarking is just a tool for catching up, not for jumping way ahead. Benchmarking can, however, spark ideas in the team—especially if teams use as their benchmarks companies from outside their own industries."

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”