Fighting the battle of the buzzwords.

Benchmarking. Total quality management. Worker empowerment. Just-in-time manufacturing. Skill-based pay. ISO 9000.

These and a few dozen others are what have come to be called management trends during the past 20 years or so. Some refer to them as management "fads," ideas that seem to come and go with every business cycle. Now add to the list "reengineering," the latest and most talked about approach to changing the way we operate our businesses.

If you've followed these trends over time, you'll see a fairly typical scenario develop. First, we hear about the new concept, usually from a management consultant. That is followed by the amazing early results that a prominent corporation has achieved by adopting the approach. Then, other companies try to copy the approach, which usually results in failure. Next, the bad press comes, followed by a lot of "I told you so's." Then, the idea passes into oblivion and the next trend starts to take shape.

Am I getting crusty in my old age or does this all sound just too familiar? Or is it that we Americans get hung up on buzzwords and labels?

I think we tend to get ahead of ourselves when it comes to new ideas. I've heard a few speeches and read plenty on reengineering and many of the other trends mentioned above over the years. But seldom, if ever, have I heard anyone ask the speaker or author espousing the idea the most basic question: "What the heck are you talking about?"

Too often, we grab on to new ideas because the term--the buzzword--appeals to us. Just a few years ago we were told that American quality was just terrible. So, most of us, being relatively sensible and with the basic need to feed our families, reason that to stay in business and make some money, we have to improve the quality of our products. Then we hear about total quality management. Sounds like a pretty darn good idea if you ask me. Totally managing quality. That has to be the secret.

Or take "reengineering." If you're a technical type, this would seem to be right up your alley. After all, you engineered it once, you can engineer it again. Right?

Well, I asked myself, "What the heck are they talking about?" And, without consulting a business consultant, I began to collect information on reengineering.

I came across the keynote speech given by Roy Slavin, president and CEO of Siemens Industrial Automation, from this year's National Design Engineering Show in Chicago. He described business reengineering as part of the "binge-and-purge cycle that American businesses use over and over again." Using the current reengineering concept, Slavin noted, "there's a 70% chance that you will fail."

"Uh, oh," I thought, "we're already into the 'bad press' stage of the trend and I just heard about it four or five months ago."

Slavin explained the problem wasn't the concept of reengineering but rather the current "model" or "methodology." He cited a Harvard Business Review article that told how to effectively accomplish the reengineering goal.

So, I dug up the article, titled "How to Make Reengineering Really Work." Written by three New York consultants at McKinsey & Co., it began: "In all too many companies, reengineering has been not only a great success but also a great failure." About 13 pages later, I found much of it sounded a lot like other things I had read about for the past several years.

Then a friend passed along the April issue of OnQ, a journal of the American Society for Quality Control. I found a short item that asked the question I was looking for--"What do you understand reengineering to mean?"

The first sentence of the item made things a little clearer. "Reengineering is based on the clean-slate design of a business process." OK, let's keep reading.

"It's starting at the beginning and redesigning a process to accomplish its objective as if there were no process there to begin with." That threw me a little, so I read on.

"Reengineering is an attempt to improve overall the way your business is organized to serve the customer. Reengineering looks at making major changes rather than taking a continuous improvement or kaizen approach." I knew I was getting close.

"Whether they call it TQM or reengineering or continuous process improvement," the item went on, "it's the same thing. Deming preferred the term process improvement." Before you start questioning my ancestry, I have to tell you the last comment finally sank in.

Why didn't they say that in the first place?