8220;A recipe for winning in today’s fast-moving, hypercompetitive world.”

-- Dave Pottruck, president and co-CEO, The Charles Schwab Corporation

“I’ve long admired Michael Hammer’s insights into what’s wrong with businesses and his prescription for improvement. Dr. Hammer is absolutely on the mark about how growth has to be created, not just harvested, and that makes management among the most difficult, risky, and precarious of human endeavors. Today with dot-coms turning to dot-bombs and even long-established businesses being upset by upstarts, The Agenda provides a series of valuable lessons for anyone seeking success in the consumer-dominated economy. Read this book -- and hope your competitors do not.”
-- Joseph Nacchio, chairman and CEO, Qwest Communications

“Michael Hammer has once again forged ahead of the pack with a practical, specific, easily understood, and prophetic view of what’s ahead. As world business competition continues to intensify, CEOS will do well to listen to Hammer.”
-- Larry Bossidy, chairman and CEO of Honeywell International

“Like Dr. Hammer’s previous books, The Agenda articulates a new and important business sea change, the emergence of a customer-centric economy. His practical road map–for those who are willing to rise to the challenge–is a wake-up call rallying business leaders to start thinking like customers. From the boardroom to middle management, this is a must-read for every company executive. Your company’s future depends on it.” -- Mackey J. McDonald, CEO, chairman, and president, VF Corporation

From the Hardcover edition.

Auteur
DR. MICHAEL HAMMER is one of the world’s foremost business thinkers. He is the originator of both reengineering and the process enterprise, ideas that have transformed the modern business world. Through his teaching and research, he works with the management teams of leading companies to bring about fundamental change in their organizations. Time magazine included him in its first list of America’s twenty-five most influential individuals. For more information about Dr. Michael Hammer and Hammer and Company, visit www.hammerandco.com.

From the Hardcover edition.

Texte du rabat
These are tough times for business. The old solutions no longer work and the silver bullets of the late 1990s have proven to be hollow. Business-people need a tool kit of new ideas and techniques. That's what the "New York Times" business bestseller "The Agenda" delivers.

Résumé
New rules for the new game:
the ideas that every business needs to win in the customer economy

In The Agenda, Michael Hammer shows companies how to prosper in today’s world of slow growth, fierce competition, and enormously powerful customers. The winners in this extraordinarily difficult environment—companies like IBM, Duke Power, Progressive Insurance, and GE—succeed through superior operations. Their costs are lower and their quality higher than their competitors’; they get new products to market faster and they provide better customer service. How do they do it? Through near-fanatical attention to the basics of business, and by managing these basics in new and creative ways.

The Agenda teaches the ideas and techniques that any company—large or small, service firm or manufacturer—can use to out-execute and out-innovate its competitors. Businesses that follow these principles will grow by taking market share away from those that do not. While others decline, your company can thrive. The Agenda will show you how.

Échantillon de lecture
1
Get Serious About Business Again
Welcome to the Customer Economy

Suddenly, business is not so easy anymore.

For a very brief period in the late 1990s, it seemed that all the problems of business had been solved. Everywhere one turned, enterprises were booming. Established companies were racking up record sales and earnings. Start-ups were deluged with capital. Everyone was doing well, and everyone was making money. Growth and success were taken for granted. Confidence was high. Customers were spending. The stock market was moving in one direction only--up.

Anyone seemed to be able to win at business. Knowledge, technique, and experience were not needed, only energy, gumption, and attitude. The new American dream had nothing to do with working hard and long to build a business but featured instead hanging out with some buddies, coming up with a cool idea, and "going public" in a year or so. The business zeitgeist, as promoted by self-proclaimed visionaries, was that we were in a "New Economy," in which the business cycle had become a thing of the past. The Internet had changed everything, and mundane issues like cost and quality and inventory had become irrelevant.

Not anymore. The longest economic expansion in U.S. history is winding down, and the giddy days of the 1990s are now mere memories. As of this writing, the business media are no longer reporting on plants running over capacity, on companies scrambling to fill positions, or on venture-funded start-ups revolutionizing this industry or that. Instead, we are hearing about layoffs and store closings, energy shortages and soaring costs, decreased advertising and lower profits, missed earnings expectations and steep stock market declines. Business school applications are up, and IPOs are down.

Businesspeople's smugness has given way to anxiety. They can no longer take growth for granted or assume that this year will be better than last. Now they must worry whether customers will buy, costs will rise, or competitors will overtake them. They lie awake wondering if the fundamental premises of their businesses will remain valid. They are shocked to find that markets go down as well as up and that growth has to be created, not just harvested. Managers are learning again that most new ideas do not succeed, that many companies fail, that resources are always scarce, and that above all, business is not a game for amateurs.

Managers are rediscovering that business is about execution. It is not about having the right "business model" or capturing eyeballs, about creating a really cool work space or planning a launch party. Suddenly bereft of inflated stock market evaluations--a cushion that on the one hand allowed companies to make acquisitions for free and to pay their people with options instead of money, and that on the other made customers feel rich and free-spending--businesspeople are back to watching every penny. They have been reminded that it's not enough to get the order, you have to fill it; that having an idea for a product does you no good if you can't develop it; and that even Wall Street analysts will be fooled by a hot concept only for so long. Business today is no longer about grand visions and the arrogance of youth. The time is past for frivolous notions and flights of fancy. Business today is about nuts and bolts, the mechanics of making companies work. It is serious stuff.

Even if the current downturn proves to be brief, even if fiscal and monetary policymakers pull more rabbits out of their hats, there will be no return to the state of innocence of the 1990s. Just as a generation of investors was permanently scarred by the Great Depression, a generation of managers has been transformed by the collapse of the bubble of the late 1990s. They have become modest and serious, fearful of their environment and uncertain about their futures.

This is as it should be. The halcyon days of the 1990s were an aberration. Tough times are the norm. Only rarely do external events conspire to give us an environment in which businesses can operate nearly effortlessly. The 1950s were one such period, when the United States alone…