The whole organisational development movement started here, driven by the need to align individuals with wider goals set by leaders.
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In partial contrast, the idea of a Learning Organisation appealed to a more human approach to work, in contrast with the hardness of BPR which saw humans as readily disposable widgets in a wider manufacturing process. There were of course linked dependencies, the growth of cheap computing was essential to the information requirements of BPR to take one example. What you had was a sort of perfect storm in which a whole set of things came together and then amplified each other. I got my MBA after three years of part-time study in 1986, back in the early days of that movement. It grew quickly because its launch coincided with the first ERP system in SAP which in turn generated a requirement for large teams of consultants, that resulted in massive growth in a manufacturing model of consultancy which also drove the formation and rapid rise of business schools & MBAs although that move was already underway as the idea of management as a profession was growing. There is a Yin and Yang aspect to the two.īusiness Process Re-engineering (BPR) had a very strong focus on efficiency but after a promising start seemed to end up with a focus on cost reduction with staff layoffs being its greatest characteristic. Whatever those two books change things fundamentally and they represent two aspects of an all too common dichotomy that has perpetuated itself in management thinking ever since.
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Hammer had previously published an HBR article in 1990 and there is some argument that Tom Davenport also originated the term in the same year. They are Hammer & Champy’s 1993 Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution and Peter Senge’s 1990 The Fifth Discipline, the Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. If you go back in time then two books could be considered to have laid the foundation for what I have termed the ‘systems thinking’ era which runs from the 1990s and is now (hopefully) starting to run out of steam while leaving much of value.