Corporate ‘Evangelist’ Sells ‘Re-Engineering’ to Big-Business Execs : Consulting: His book is a bestseller, but on the downside, the movement he advocates sometimes means jobs disappear and plants close.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —  Michael Hammer is part teacher, part preacher, an apostle for executives looking to shake up their companies.

With no formal business training or experience running a big company, Hammer is carrying out a crusade under the banner of one word that doesn’t sound sexy, but has struck a chord in corporate America.

Re-engineering.

This word has helped make Hammer a best-selling author, not to mention a hot commodity for hundreds of companies each year that pay $2,000 per person to hear him deliver his gospel at sold-out seminars.

“I’m in the evangelism business,” Hammer says. “To move from the old mind-set to the new one is a little bit of a religious conversion.”

Hammer, 45, is president of Hammer and Co., a small management education and consulting firm in Cambridge. But he is better known as co-author of “Re-Engineering the Corporation,” a book that has been perched on the New York Times’ bestseller list for more than 20 weeks, selling more than 300,000 copies.

His message: Companies must completely rethink how and why they conduct business the way they do, ridding themselves of operations that have become antiquated in the computer age.

“Re-engineering basically says forget how you work, forget the way you do stuff, throw it away, start with a clean sheet of paper,” Hammer said. “It’s a mammoth undertaking.”

It’s also an undertaking adopted by executives who want to keep their companies profitable in the face of global competition and a weak economy.

Several months ago, for instance, Procter & Gamble Co. announced a major reorganization to streamline the company and make it more efficient. Using the language of the re-engineering movement, P&G; Chairman Edwin Artzt said he wanted to “take our company apart brick by brick and put it back together again.”

This process, however, also has a downside: P&G; decided to cut 13,000 jobs and close 30 plants. Hammer says this is a byproduct of re-engineering, but he sees no choice.

“The alternative is everybody is out of a job,” he said. “If we don’t do it, then we become non-competitive in the world marketplace.”

But while Hammer is out winning disciples with his seminars and his book, some say re-engineering is just the latest version of ideas put forth for years by management gurus for cleaning cobwebs from corporate bureaucracies.

“A book like this is crystallizing or capturing a wave, rather than causing it,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Hammer said he arrived at the word re-engineering from his background in computer science, which he taught for 10 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The term has historically referred to the process of taking apart an electronics product and designing a better version. Hammer said he realized the same principles could be applied to business.

While at MIT, he did consulting on the side, advising businesses about ways to use computer technology. He found companies were using computers simply to automate outdated processes, rather than finding better ways to run their businesses.

Hammer began formulating his ideas about re-engineering, and gave them broad attention with an article he wrote in 1990 for Harvard Business Review.

“I’m trying to make re-engineering widespread,” he said. “I’m trying to spread the news.”

Hammer is a bit of a showman and has a penchant for using hyperbole to make his points. For example, he says he was a “founder” of a local software company, Interleaf Inc., although he served as an outside member of the board of directors, advising the people who launched the firm.

David Boucher, who ran the company from its beginning, said Hammer’s use of the term founder “would probably be stretching it,” but he praised Hammer as “very, very smart and perceptive. I think consistently, he was one of the most valuable board members we had.”

Hammer also wins praise from Hallmark Cards Inc., one of the companies he advised along with James Champy, the other co-author of “Re-Engineering the Corporation” and chairman of CSC Index Inc., a local consulting firm.

Hallmark changed the way its employees were grouped to dramatically speed up the time it takes for greeting cards to go from an artist’s desk to retail stores. Where it once took weeks to manually tally how many copies of a certain card were sold, the task now can be accomplished within a day using computer codes.

Buddy Jones, a vice president of Kansas City, Mo.-based Hallmark, said his company was already looking for ways to improve, but the re-engineering movement “brought us a technique on how to do that change.”

Hammer expects there will be many more companies going through such changes.

“It’s not a fad,” he said. “It’s a real phenomenon. It’s going to be around for a long time.”