In 1990, while MC Hammer was telling everyone “U Can’t Touch This,” another Hammer, Michael, a computer scientist at MIT, was publishing an article in the Harvard Business Review telling corporate America exactly what it should touch. All of it. With a wrecking ball. The title said it plainly: “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.”
Two Hammers, one year, two anthems. One had the parachute pants. The other had the PowerPoint. Only one of them would end up apologizing in the Wall Street Journal.
Michael Hammer’s argument was clean and seductive. American companies, he wrote, were trapped in decades old processes built on outdated assumptions. They weren’t slow because they needed better tools. They were slow because their fundamental business rules were broken. The solution wasn’t to patch the system. It was to blow it up and start fresh.
The promise was intoxicating. Forget incremental improvement. Reengineering offered something better: radical redesign. Quantum leaps in performance. One early success story became the blueprint: Ford Motor Company reduced its accounts payable department from 500 people to 125, a 75 percent headcount cut, by fundamentally rethinking how invoices were processed. It looked like proof of concept.
Three years later, in 1993, Hammer and management consultant James Champy published “Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.” The book became a bestseller. It landed on executive desks as scripture. The message was clear: transform or die. CEOs around the world caught the fever. By 1994, a survey by CSC Index found that 69 percent of U.S. companies had launched some kind of reengineering initiative. The consulting industry that grew around it was worth 4.7 billion dollars by the mid 1990s, close to 10 billion in today’s money.
I Was There
In 1995, I was working for an airline at the Congonhas airport in São Paulo, Brazil. Reengineering wasn’t an abstract concept discussed in boardrooms. It was happening in real time around me. The airlines operating out of that hub were all caught in the fever. Every conversation in the hallways, every meeting, every memo circling around was about transformation, about radical redesign, about doing more with less. The promise was the same everywhere: dramatic improvements, efficiency gains, competitive advantage.
But what we actually saw was fear. My colleagues, skilled people with years of institutional knowledge, people who understood how the airport actually worked, were watching their roles disappear. Not being replaced by better systems. Disappearing. The anxiety was thick. People were losing jobs. Careers were being upended. And the language coming from management never quite matched the reality on the ground. They talked about optimization and transformation. We watched people pack their desks. It was my first real world encounter with the gap between management theory and human consequence.
The Theory Hits Reality
What happened across the broader economy in those years should have been obvious to anyone paying attention to human behavior. But the movement was too intoxicated by its own logic to notice.
Teams were assembled. They went away for months, armed with the mandate to reimagine their business from scratch. They came back convinced they had the answer. The rest of the organization was still trying to figure out what the question was.
Studies in the early 1990s began to document what was actually happening on the ground. Seventy percent or more of reengineering initiatives didn’t just fail to deliver the promised transformation. They made things worse. They bred confusion. Delays. Resentment. Screwups. Promises of “dramatic improvement” became code for layoffs, often executed with ruthless speed and no real plan for what came next. Hammer himself had used language that, in retrospect, reads as chillingly cavalier: “In reengineering, we carry the wounded and shoot the stragglers.” Another gem: “It’s basically taking an ax and a machine gun to your existing organization.”
The people who worked in those organizations heard that rhetoric loud and clear. They heard it as a threat. And they were right. The reengineering movement had made a fundamental and embarrassing error. It had forgotten that organizations are made of people. Real humans with mortgages, families, skills, and dignity. People who understand their work in ways that no consultant can grasp in a three month engagement. People whose buy in, adaptation, and goodwill are actually essential to making any new process work. The movement had treated humans as variables to be optimized out of the equation, rather than as the critical infrastructure they actually are.
The Confession
By 1996, the cracks were too wide to ignore. Companies were in crisis. Survivors of reengineering initiatives were burned out, cynical, and hostile to further change. Hammer became the public face of something that had started as a revolutionary vision and devolved into a euphemism for ruthless cost cutting.
So Michael Hammer did something rare. He admitted he was wrong. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he confessed: “I wasn’t smart enough about that. I was reflecting my engineering background and was insufficiently appreciative of the human dimension. I’ve learned that’s critical.”
James Champy apologized in an article in “Across the Board.” Thomas Davenport, another thought leader in the space, wrote a confessional cover story for the premiere issue of “Fast Company,” saying: “The last thing that I would have ever imagined was that people would start losing their jobs because of some ideas that I was offering.”
All three said essentially the same thing: Amid the fervor of revolutionary change, they had forgotten about people.
Why It Mattered Then
The reengineering movement taught an expensive lesson. It showed that you can have perfect logic, compelling data, and visionary leadership and still fail spectacularly if you treat transformation as a technical problem rather than a human one. It showed that the speed of implementation matters less than the depth of buy-in. It showed that people don’t resist change because they’re obstinate or afraid of progress. They resist change when they’ve been left out of the decision making, when their expertise is dismissed, when the only communication they get is a layoff notice.
By the late 1990s, the age of reengineering was declared over. Companies had learned, or so it seemed, that transformation required managing the human dimension. Change management became a discipline. Engagement became a buzzword. Organizations began, tentatively, to rebuild trust.
The lesson was clear: never again.
Now
Thirty one years later. From São Paulo in 1995, through sixteen years in Texas, to Belgium in 2026. And here I am, watching a familiar pattern unfold once again. The fever is back. The rhetoric is unmistakable. Revolutionary change is coming, and if you’re not moving fast, you’re falling behind. The technology is different. But the pattern follows an old script.
To be clear, AI is not reengineering. It is a far more capable technology with the potential to create genuine value. Unlike the workflow redesigns of the 1990s, modern AI can eliminate tedious work, accelerate learning, and enable people to solve problems that were previously out of reach. Used thoughtfully, it can make work more meaningful rather than less. Many organizations are already proving that. The technology itself isn’t repeating the mistakes of the past. The risk lies in how leaders choose to deploy it. When AI becomes primarily a vehicle for rapid cost reduction, organizational simplification, or headcount targets, history begins to repeat.
Companies are rushing to deploy, promising transformation, focusing on speed and cost efficiency, and treating the human dimension as something to be managed around, not through. The rhetoric has changed only slightly. Nobody says “obliterate” anymore (at least in this context). Management theory quietly retired the word after the backlash of the late nineties. Instead, today’s AI playbooks favor softer vocabulary: “optimizing,” “augmenting,” or “right-sizing.” Executives no longer talk about flattening organizations with heavy machinery; they speak of liberating employees from “routine taskwork” so they can “focus on high-value strategy.” It’s gentler language, but the underlying organizational incentives feel remarkably familiar: remove humans from the equation where possible, optimize for efficiency, move fast. And once again, the people being affected are hearing the real message underneath the rhetoric: your role is being redesigned, possibly away.
The difference this time is that we have the historical precedent. We have Hammer’s confession. We have thirty years of evidence that this playbook fails when you forget the human dimension. We have a clear warning, written in broken careers and lost institutional knowledge, that says: do not repeat this mistake.
The question is whether anyone is actually listening. Back then, the whole world knew the song by heart. It was the lesson we couldn’t touch.
Stop. It’s Hammer time again.
References
Hammer, M. (1990). “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-August 1990. https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate
Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993). “Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.” Harper Collins, New York.
Kellogg School of Management (1999). “Business Process Reengineering: Its History, Promises, and Problems.” https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/research/detail/1999/business-process-reengineering-its-history-promises-and-problems/
Strategy+Business. “Revisiting Reengineering.” (Covers the failure studies and the confessions of Hammer, Champy, and Davenport.) https://www.strategy-business.com/article/19570
Fast Company. “The Fad That Forgot People.” (Thomas Davenport’s confessional cover story from the premiere issue.) https://www.fastcompany.com/26310/fad-forgot-people
Computerworld. “Reengineering Revisited.” (Includes the 1996 Wall Street Journal confession by Michael Hammer, the 4.7 billion dollar industry figure, and his “wounded and stragglers” rhetoric.) https://www.computerworld.com/article/1726087/reengineering-revisited.html
MIT Technology Review (2003). “Reengineering Redux.” (Hammer’s own retrospective on the movement.) https://www.technologyreview.com/2003/09/17/40638/reengineering-redux/
Inc. Magazine Encyclopedia. “Reengineering.” (Covers the Louis Harris & Associates 1996 survey and the movement’s association with layoffs.) https://www.inc.com/encyclopedia/reengineering.html