These are tough times for business. The old solutions don't work anymore, and the silver bullets of the late 1990s have proven to be hollow. Serious business people know there is no simple solution, no single answer. They need a whole tool kit of new ideas and new techniques. That's what The Agenda delivers.

Michael Hammer, author of Reengineering the Corporation, the defining business book of the 1990s, has uncovered the secrets of today's best companies. He has worked long and hard to identify how these companies consistently outexecute their competitors, and he reveals what he has learned in The Agenda.

Make life easy for your customers. Your customers' biggest gripe is not that your products are bad, but that it is too tough to order, receive, and pay for them. In short, you are a royal pain to do business with. You need to take a hard look at how you operate from your customers' point of view. In other words, run your business for their convenience, not yours.

Link companies together through the Internet. Break down the walls that separate you from other companies, walls that create huge amounts of inefficiency and overhead. Change your distribution channel from a series of resellers into a community that works together to serve the final customer. Redesign your operations in tandem with those of your suppliers and customers. Stop seeing yourself as a self-contained unit that creates a product on its own, and get used to the idea of virtually integrating with others.