Business Process Reengineering
Origin: Hammer & Champy (1993)
Biological Parallel
Mass extinctions force business process reengineering at planetary scale: the asteroid that killed dinosaurs created 65 million years of evolutionary opportunity, and mammals radiated into 5,400 new species—complete process redesign, not incremental improvement. Metamorphosis is individual reengineering: caterpillars don't optimize crawling; they dissolve into cellular soup and rebuild as flying organisms. The shift from anaerobic to aerobic metabolism wasn't continuous improvement—it was radical reengineering that increased energy efficiency 18-fold. BPR mirrors biology's disruption principle: sometimes the process is so broken that optimization is irrelevant—only complete redesign delivers magnitude improvements.