Of all the ideas that quaked the corporate world in the early 1990s, Reengineering shook companies up the most, arguably. If the after-tremors are still being felt, it's probably because the relevance of its central premise still holds good.

The way a business is structured, how it operates and what it does must always be a function of its future objectives, rather than a legacy of the past. This ought to be obvious. Yet, most businesses are derivations of the past. The solution, at least as Michael Hammer and James Champy put it, is Reengineering The Corporation, the title of their buzzword-defining book of 1990. Companies, they argue, need to be taken apart and rebuilt-right from the drawing board-to thrive in the post-industrial world.

The real radicalism lies in the details. "It is no longer necessary or desirable for companies to organise their work around Adam Smith's division of labour," they say, arguing that plain task-oriented jobs are turning obsolete. This is happening as a result of intensifying competitive forces, surviving which requires the rapid devolution of the decision-making apparatus.

Most business reengineers so far have concentrated their efforts on redesigning 'core processes'-those that relate directly to market need fulfillment. Some have even reported dramatic improvements on critical performance parameters (mainly by de-cluttering processes and ridding them of all the mindless 'junk' accumulated over the years).

Actual Reengineering, as envisaged by Hammer and Champy, though, would turn the top leader into a vision-setter, with a delayered operating structure featuring managers empowered to think autonomously in pursuit of objectives. This would have people devote more time to the market and less to guarding their backs, even as they use information technology to tighten operations for super-efficiency (just-in-time supplies, for instance).

Reengineering has its share of critics. Also, restructuring bouts that result in mass sackings have engendered a deep cynicism of the idea. But then, the gross misuse of well-intentioned ideas is not new; and Hammer and Champy do not stand for ritualistic reengineering of any sort. In fact, their whole idea is to reason everything through.