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In this section, we look at two case examples of restructuring. Some represent examples of reengineering, which rose to prominence in the 1990s as an umbrella concept for emerging trends in structural thinking. Hammer and Champy promised a revolution in how organizations were structured:

When a process is reengineered, jobs evolve from narrow and task oriented to multidimensional. People who once did as they were instructed now make choices and decisions on their own instead. Assembly‐line work disappears. Functional departments lose their reason for being. Managers stop acting like supervisors and behave more like coaches. Workers focus more on customers' needs and less on their bosses' whims. Attitudes and values change in response to new incentives. Practically every aspect of the organization is transformed, often beyond recognition. (1993, p. 65)

More than half of all Fortune 500 companies jumped on the reengineering bandwagon in the mid‐1990s, but only about a third of those efforts were successful. Champy admitted in a follow‐up book, Reengineering Management (1995), that reengineering was in trouble, and attributed the shortfall to flaws in senior management thinking.

Some reengineering initiatives have indeed been catastrophic, a notorious example being the long‐haul bus company Greyhound Lines. As the company came out of bankruptcy in the early 1990s, a new management team announced a major reorganization, with sizable cuts in staffing and routes and development of a new, computerized reservation system. The initiative played well on Wall Street, where the company's stock soared, but poorly on Main Street as customer service and the new reservations system collapsed. Rushed, underfunded, and insensitive to both employees and customers, it was a textbook example of how not to restructure. Eventually, Greyhound's stock crashed, and management was forced out. One observer noted wryly, “They reengineered that business to hell” (Tomsho, 1994, p. A1). Across many organizations, reengineering was camouflage for downsizing the workforce, often with disappointing results.

Nevertheless, despite the many disasters, there have also been examples of notable restructuring success. Here we discuss two of them, drawn from different industries.