Today, making small but steady improvements in performance is only a recipe for falling further behind. What's needed, instead, is the ability to identify—and then capture—the opportunities for genuinely large-scale changes in performance. And that means rethinking and, if necessary, fundamentally re-engineering how a company delivers value to its customers. The problem, of course, is that such rethinking inevitably runs up against the company's entrenched business system and organizational structure. In this Roundtable, four McKinsey practitioners discuss how using process redesign can help managers break through these barriers.

Browning: What made all of you start thinking about core process redesign? Why has it become so active an area of interest just now?

Hagel: For me, it was watching closely as a company I knew well made a huge performance improvement in a very brief period by taking an integrated approach to redesigning one of its major business processes.

Browning: What do you mean by an "integrated" approach?

Hagel: When this company first approached us, they thought of their performance problem in very narrow terms: it was a sales problem, a salesforce problem. After having launched a lot of TQM and continuous improvement initiatives, they were still frustrated...