In his view, it already has. Guys like me and Hammer just kind of throw this stuff against the wall. Some of it sticks and some doesn't. But there was a reason the zeitgeist responded to this particular management fad. Implicit in the reengineers' method, but only vaguely and occasionally voiced, was an extremely powerful idea whose potential still has not been realized.
Organizations are machines.
To be sure, this idea has been programmed from the top down. But while reengineers like Dr. Hammer unwittingly echoed these traditions, and they sometimes fell prey to the same hubris, they also moved beyond it in into the post-industrial realm. For a corporation is not just an ordinary machine. It is like a complex computer system, an intricate form of artificial life running on thousands of brains networked together. The computer is the company.