Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done

by Michael Hammer, Lisa Hershman

A bold and revolutionary thinker's legacy for how business can meet the greatest economic challenge in decades...
 
It's no everyone knows that the way most companies do things is screwed up. Surprisingly, though, herein lays the biggest opportunity for improving growth and profitability in a world in which consumers are tapped out and competition is coming from the devastating combination of low-wage countries with high skills.
 
For more than a decade, following his landmark Reengineering the Corporation, Michael Hammer did "deep dives" into the processes of companies in every imaginable business--from oil refineries to software developers, factories, retailers, and hospitals--to understand the nuts and bolts of how they do their work, and then to advise them how to do it differently to become faster, cheaper, better. The results were the right product, at the right time, with the right price and quality--businesses that not only ate the competitions' lunch but their breakfast and dinner, too.
 
The research and passion Dr. Hammer brought to this book have been ably carried on, following his tragic and unexpected death in 2008, by his colleague, Lisa Hershman, now the CEO of Hammer and Company. Looking at a company's operations not in terms of piecemeal fragments of work performed in a slew of isolated functional departments but as large-scale holistic work units transformed many companies, enabling them to meet the unique challenges of our time.
 
The late DR. MICHAEL HAMMER was the coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation and the author of The Agenda . LISA W. HERSHMAN is the CEO of the DeNovo Group.

Genres: Business, Management, Buisness, Self Help

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Нестор · Rating 5 out of 5]

Очень хорошая книга по управлению измениями и улучшениями.

Категорически рекомендую.

[Joshua Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for a leadership book club and found it to both resonate and bore me. The examples were helpful in finding comparison between the topics and my own process based work; however, I did find the middle sections quite difficult to get through, even on an audiobook.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some basic easy to understand principles in end-to-end process management. Not a whole lot I haven't heard before, but the book is put together well and could be a good reference for future project leadership.

I'm not sold on adding people for the sole purpose of managing projects...what the book refers to as "CPO" Chief Process Officer. Extremely large and challenging projects may require this. My concern is people who hold positions like "CPO" end up with few valuable skills aside from presenting, organizing and delegating. Then CPOs are stuck inventing projects to sustain their job. Nevertheless, the duties outlined as responsibility of the CPO within this book are valuable.

[Abhi Yerra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book could have been much shorter and still kept to its core message which is processes help businesses do move faster, better, cheaper. However, it is a book written for larger companies with bigger bureaucracies so there are a lot of examples that touch on that.

However, for the small business it is essentially have a Standard Operating Procedure and consistently evolve it.

[Annasnova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Assigned reading for my MBA course on Business Processes. Easy read with a compelling model of structuring end-to-end business processes to improve performance across the board. Though I feel like this book would need to be discussed in class with peers to fully absorb the lessons it teaches.

[Abayomi Agboola · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good book wiyh great insights into impotant aspects of creating an efficient work process where there is no hero. That being said, it could be shorter, concise and less painful to read.

[Sarah Dahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some good principles in this book. I found it a little outdated.

[Robert Chapman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was more geared to process change in larger enterprises; however, there are a lot of transferable thoughts for smaller companies as well. In the end the book drives home notion that process change is all about adding value for your customers, which in turn drives up profits and lowers cost of operations.

The stories of how bad processes have totally screwed up the customer experience are pretty enlightening. There are also many stories of how process engineering worked wonders and turned around bad situations.

[Kathleen Rainwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book focuses on the potential of process improvement in an era of increasingly intense competition. The authors present seven essential principles (identifying and fine-tuning such factors as "who does the work," "where the work is done," etc.) and a tool kit of nine "levers," or changes, for how actual work streams can be organized and executed more effectively in companies across industries and across the globe. Case studies in the final section show how these end-to-end process have been applied in real enterprises,

[Ben Donahower · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is mostly geared towards larger companies but any company or anyone with an interest in process management will get something from this book. My only concern with this book is that because it's about process, there are many methodologies and step by step systems presented in the book that would be best augmented with (preferably digital) checklists, charts, and other breakdowns of the material that was spelled out in the written word.

[Theodore Kinni · Rating 3 out of 5]

The late reengineering guru's final book is nuts-and-bolts look at making companies work better. Part 1 is terrific -- filled with straight talk and prescriptive advice.