By Cari Tuna of The Wall Street Journal

In the early 1990s, as personal computers, the Internet and cellphones began to transform the business landscape, Michael Hammer rose to prominence as the champion of the decade's trendiest management buzzword: "re-engineering."

Using new paradigms and technologies, companies were meant to redesign business processes from the ground up to meet goals faster and serve clients better.

Mr. Hammer, who died Thursday at age 60, gave the idea currency in an incendiary 1993 business best seller "Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution." The book sold over two million copies, stoking the growth of a multibillion-dollar re-engineering movement and catapulting Mr. Hammer to the forefront of management consultancy. In 1996, Time featured him on its first annual list of America's 25 most influential people, and Forbes in 2002 ranked "Reengineering the Corporation" the third most influential business book of the past two decades.

Through his consultancy, Mr. Hammer helped trucking company Schneider National Inc. cut the time it took to complete a job bid to two days from two weeks. At Royal Dutch Shell PLC, he helped improve reliability and reduce costs by focusing attention on refinery safety and efficiency. He consulted at scores of other large companies, and his seminars commanded a $50,000 fee.

"He had a tremendous wit ... and he was very challenging to your thinking," recalled Tom Purves, a vice president of manufacturing for Shell who worked with Mr. Hammer. Mr. Purves said the management guru was known for asking the same question at every turn: "Why?"

"It would drive you crazy sometimes, but it would help you understand," Mr. Purves said.

But re-engineering had a dark side, as the streamlining of processes often went hand in hand with reductions in workers. Often the term became jargon for mass layoffs. Mr. Hammer's rhetoric didn't help. "It's basically taking an ax and a machine gun to your existing organization," he said in a 1994 interview with Computerworld. He once told Forbes: "On this journey we'll carry our wounded and shoot the dissenters."

In a 1996 interview with The Wall Street Journal, he admitted that he and other re-engineering proponents hadn't paid enough attention to people.

"I wasn't smart enough about that," Mr. Hammer said. "I was reflecting my engineering background and was insufficiently appreciative of the human dimension. I've learned that's critical."

Mr. Hammer was the son of Holocaust survivors. His father was a rabbi. Mr. Hammer was an Orthodox Jew and refrained from flipping a light switch on the Sabbath, when such actions are prohibited.

At one time, Mr. Hammer was a professor of computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his alma mater. "After I got tenured at MIT, I got bored and I quit," Mr. Hammer told the Journal in 1996. "My wife thought I was crazy."

He turned instead to business consulting, and by the mid-1990s, at the height of the re-engineering frenzy, he was delivering 150 speeches per year.

After criticisms emerged, Mr. Hammer modified the concept to account for the human factor in a series of new books. By 2004, when he was interviewed in Newsweek, he acknowledged that some had vilified him for the layoffs. "But I don't have a guilty conscience," he said. "At a lot of organizations, if they hadn't re-engineered, they simply would have gone out of business."