The reengineering playbook didn't disappear. It just changed names.
"Don't automate, obliterate" was written more than 30 years ago, about a completely different technology. It's still the correct instruction for the one being sold today.
The phrase that started it
In 1990, management theorist Michael Hammer published an article in Harvard Business Review with a title that still holds up as advice today: "Don't Automate, Obliterate." His argument was simple and, at the time, genuinely radical — companies were spending enormous sums computerizing their existing processes, and getting almost nothing for it, because a computerized bad process is still a bad process. His answer wasn't better software. It was tearing the process down and rebuilding it from the actual business objective, not from whatever steps happened to already exist.
Three years later, Hammer and co-author James Champy expanded the idea into Reengineering the Corporation, and business process reengineering became one of the most influential — and most widely misapplied — management ideas of the decade. The misapplication is the part worth paying attention to, because it's the same misapplication happening again right now, three technology generations later.
Four waves, one recurring mistake
Business process reengineering
The original insight: computerizing a bad process just makes it a faster bad process. The correct move is redesigning the process around the actual objective first. Widely praised in theory — and, in practice, widely reduced by companies to a euphemism for headcount cuts, without the actual process redesign that made the idea work in the first place.
ERP adoption
Enterprise resource planning systems promised to unify finance, operations, and reporting into one platform. Companies that mapped their actual processes before implementation got the promised value. Companies that tried to configure the software around their existing — often broken — workflows got multi-year, over-budget implementations that automated the same dysfunction the software was supposed to fix.
Automation and RPA
Robotic process automation let companies script their existing workflows directly, no redesign required — which was exactly the problem. A scripted bad process fails faster and more invisibly than a manual one, because nobody's watching it happen step by step anymore. The tool executed the mistake more efficiently than any previous generation of technology had.
AI
The pitch is the most sophisticated version yet — a system that doesn't just execute a script but adapts, reasons, and improves. That sophistication is exactly why getting the sequence wrong here is more expensive than any previous generation. A capable AI system layered onto an unclear process doesn't just fail; it produces plausible, confident output on top of a broken foundation, which is far harder to catch than a script that simply breaks.
Why the mistake keeps recurring
Every one of these waves arrived with genuine, real capability behind it — ERP, RPA, and AI all deliver real value when applied correctly. That's actually part of why the mistake keeps happening: the technology is impressive enough on its own that it's easy to believe the impressiveness is the whole solution. It never has been. The technology is the second decision, not the first.
The first decision is always the same one Hammer described in 1990: understand what the process is actually supposed to accomplish, strip out what doesn't serve that, and only then decide where technology earns a place in what's left. That sequence doesn't change with the tool. It's the reason the same automation-era mistake we've written about before keeps showing up under a new name every decade — and it's the discipline behind every engagement on this site, well before AI made it a trending topic.
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