Outsmart!
How to Do What Your Competitors Can’t
By Jim Champy
FT Prentice Hall $22.99, £14.99

The name of Jim Champy will be familiar to many. Along with Michael Hammer and Thomas Davenport, he was largely responsible for the invention and dissemination of business process re-engineering, the great business fad of the early 1990s. BPR is still controversial. Consultants made a fortune out of it, but many companies claimed they never saw the benefits. Today, Champy and his colleagues maintain that BPR was misunderstood. Others use different words – shorter and more obviously of Anglo-Saxon origin.

One of the criticisms of BPR was that it robbed companies of their distinctiveness and made every business look the same. So the first surprise about Champy’s new book Outsmart! is that it is about achieving distinctiveness, making your company unique and thereby establishing competitive advantage. The second surprise is that it is really rather good.