THE WORKPLACE

A Ringing Success: The Taco Bell fast-food chain, which is based in Irvine, gets a chapter to itself in a new book about making corporations more efficient.

“Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution” recently made the New York Times “advice, how-to and miscellaneous” bestseller list.

The book is by two management consultants--Michael Hammer and James Champy--who say that managers should think in terms of reinventing the structures of their businesses.

When CEO John Martin came aboard at Taco Bell in 1983, the company was a “top-down, ‘command-and-control’ organization with multiple layers of management, each concerned primarily with bird-dogging the layers below them,” Martin is quoted as saying in the book.

Taco Bell had “operational handbooks for everything--including, literally, handbooks to interpret other handbooks.

“We were going backwards--fast.”

Taco Bell started with a single goal: becoming the nation’s largest fast-food company. It began by reducing all costs except what it spends on food--even its marketing costs. From there, everything else about the corporate culture was on the table, and much of it has changed in 10 years.

That strategy seems to have worked. Taco Bell’s sales growth--after filtering out inflation--was a negative 16% for the five years before Martin became CEO. In the last 10 years, however, sales have gone from $500 million to $3 billion.

“Old notions about how businesses should be organized and run,” the authors write, “must be abandoned.”