Revolutionizing business basics.

• Author: Holtzman, Henry
• Position: Required Reading

"The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade" Michael Hammer Crown Business New York, N.Y. 2001, 269 pages, $27.50

Early in his book, Dr. Hammer refers to a story told about Albert Einstein. Einstein's secretary reminds him that the exam he has prepared for his students is the same one he gave the previous year, and the students would recognize the questions. Einstein replied that "even though the questions were all the same, the answers had changed."

True or not, the story foreshadows the remainder of the book.

As Hammer points out:

What is true of physics is true of business. Today's business world is not that of Peter Drucker or of Tom Peters and Bob Waterman, and it calls for a new edition of the management agenda.

The mission of this book is to set it forth.

The entire point of "The Agenda" is to set out where business management should be going during the first 10 years of the new millennium. Managing a business while industry is changing on a global scale isn't easy, but as the author notes, managing a business at any time has always been difficult and risky. Innovative factors such as inexpensive computerization and international competition may have fueled the high times of the 1990s, but there is nothing new about surplus capacity and the search for lower overhead. Hammer states:

"This then is the real 'new economy.' It did not begin in 1995, it has little to do with the Internet, and it certainly does not require pretentious capitalization. It is the customer economy, which has been growing and gathering steam for the last 25 years. The circumstances that have driven the customer economy are not yet played out; indeed, they are accelerating. There is no foreseeable end to increases in global competition, overcapacity, commoditization, or customer knowledge, or to the customer power that flows from them."

Hammer goes on to note that it was a revolution in business management that fueled the boom times that began in the late 1980s, not the Internet or policies of the U.S. Federal Reserve. He correctly notes that a... "Rip Van Winkle who had fallen asleep in the 1970s and awoke today would not recognize the business world." Certainly the biggest single change has been the customer-driven marketplace, regardless of whether the customer is part of the general consumer group or one of Fortune's 500.

Most of "The Agenda" takes a closer look of the management methods of operating which impact business results. Two of...