Topic: Michael Hammer

Michael Martin Hammer (13 April 1948 - 3 Sept 2008) was an American engineer, management author, and a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), known as one of the founders of the management theory of Business process reengineering (BPR).

Hammer, the child of Holocaust survivors, grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. He and his wife, Phyllis Thurm Hammer, lived in Newton, Massachusetts with their four children, Jessica, Allison, Dana, and David.

An engineer by training, he was the proponent of a process oriented view of business management. He earned BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in EECS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968, 1970, and 1973 respectively. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the department of Computer science and lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management. He published in important business periodicals such as the Harvard Business Review and The Economist.