Thursday, September 4, 2008

Re-engineering guru Michael Hammer dies at 60

By Mass High Tech Staff

Former MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer and business process revolutionary Michael Hammer has died at the age of 60, following an accident on Friday, Aug. 22, while vacationing in the Berkshires, according a spokesperson at his Cambridge-based firm Hammer and Co.

Hammer was an engineer, having received bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from MIT. He was a proponent of applying process-oriented techniques to business management. In 1993, he co-wrote the well-known book “Reengineering the Corporation” with James Champy, chairman of Perot Systems.

The premise of the book was that work must be structured in an entirely new way. “It is no longer necessary or desirable for companies to organize their work around Adam Smith’s division of labor,” he and Champy wrote.

“Instead, companies must organize their work around process.” The book sold 2.5 million copies and remained on the “New York Times Best Seller list” for more than a year. He was also the author of The Reengineering Revolution in 1995, Beyond Reengineering in 1997 and The Agenda in 2001.

In addition to lecturing at Sloan, Hammer was a professor of computer science at MIT and a Fellow at Oxford University.

Dan Bricklin, the developer of the first computer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, said of Hammer: “I’ve known Michael Hammer for many, many years. When I started at MIT in my first course in computers, he was my TA. But the big thing was, next summer he and I went to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and I learned a lot from him — and just not about computers but about life. He knew how to get things done.”

Hammer was also named by Time magazine to its first list of America’s 25 most influential individuals.

Hammer was known for his relentless pursuit of “why?,” which drove his entire career. “My modus operandi is simple,” he once wrote, “though not always easy to carry out. I take nothing at face value. I approach all business issues and practices with the same skepticism: Why?”

The only child of Holocaust survivors, Hammer is survived by his wife of 35 years, Phyllis Thurm Hammer, and their four children: Jessica, of New York City; Alison, of Cambridge; Dana, of New York City; and David, of San Francisco.