James Champy

Chairman of Consulting

James Champy is chairman of Perot Systems Corporation’s consulting practice and also head of strategy for the company. He is responsible for providing direction and guidance to the company’s team of business and management consultants.

Mr. Champy is a leading authority worldwide on the management issues surrounding business reengineering, organizational change, and corporate renewal. He consults extensively with senior-level executives of multinational companies seeking to improve business performance. His approach centers on helping leaders achieve business results through four distinct, yet overlapping areas: business strategy, management and operations, organizational development and change, and information technology.

Prior to joining Perot Systems, Mr. Champy was chairman and chief executive officer of CSC Index, the management consulting arm of Computer Sciences Corporation. He was one of the original founders of Index, a $200 million consulting practice that was acquired by CSC in 1988.

Mr. Champy is co-author of Reengineering the Corporation, a best-seller which was on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year and sold more than two million copies; it has been translated into 17 languages. His follow-up book, Reengineering Management, is also a best-seller and was recognized by Business Week as one of the best business books of 1995. His next book, co-authored with Harvard Business School professor Nitin Nohria, was The Arc of Ambition. Mr. Champy also collaborated with Professor Nohria for the book Fast Forward, which is a compilation of significant Harvard Business Review articles on change; it was published in March 1996. 

His next book, X-Engineering the Corporation, Reinventing Your Business in the Digital Age, was released in 2002. In this work, Mr. Champy takes up the opportunity and challenge for cross-organizational process design and collaboration. In 2008, Mr. Champy’s book, Outsmart! How to Do What Your Competitors Can’t, was published. Outsmart! reveals many surprising and counterintuitive lessons learned by companies who have built new business models, or altered existing ones, to achieve super-high growth rates.

His latest book, Inspire! Why Customers Come Back, includes eight short case studies that look at how businesses become successful by “Inspiring” their customers to be loyal for the long-term. The examples show creative thought and explore how a company’s vision and mission can directly impact their sales success. Both Outsmart! and Inspire! are part of a series of concise business books, describing new business models, that Mr. Champy is writing for the Financial Times Press.