Why Reengineering?

Reengineering has an uneven record. Many efforts are launched with real conviction and end up producing very little: a new org chart, with the same broken process underneath, now with fewer people to run it. When that happens, the work doesn’t disappear; it migrates. It shows up as overtime, as a consultant on retainer, as a temp who never leaves, as a colleague quietly doing two jobs badly instead of one job well. The company hasn’t reengineered anything. It has restructured, and restructuring without redesigning the underlying process is a different, weaker thing wearing the same name.

The actual trigger for a reengineering project is almost always the same: expense. Something has made the firm’s cost structure look wrong relative to its revenue, its competitors, or its own board’s expectations, and leadership needs that number to move. For most firms, people are the largest expense line they have. You can renegotiate a lease, switch a vendor, or delay a capital project, and none of it moves the number the way changing headcount does. So even when the analysis starts, correctly, from strategy — what does this company do well, what should it be doing, what would the ideal version of this firm look like — the path from that analysis to a number the board will accept runs, more often than not, straight through the org chart.

This is where reengineering earns its reputation as a euphemism for layoffs. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, but because people are the expense that actually moves the needle, the redesign of the work and the redesign of the workforce end up being the same project, seen from two different angles. Get the process right, and the headcount consequence follows from that redesign, defensible and specific: this work no longer needs to happen, this task can be automated, this remaining piece can be absorbed by someone already doing adjacent work. Skip the process and go straight to headcount, and you get restructuring’s familiar failure mode instead: the same work, thinner staffing, and a slow bleed of quality until the company quietly rebuilds what it just cut.

A leader under real cost pressure, staring at a target the board has already blessed, may be tempted to restructure, rather than admit the harder, slower path of actually redesigning the process. The rest of this book is about doing the harder version anyway: starting from what the firm actually needs, and only then, with open eyes, following it down to the people.