Management and Organizational Changes

Rethinking the Corporation is the result of a "four-year journey" in which Tomasko studied dozens of companies around the world to find out what those corporations had done right and what they had done wrong in making management and organizational changes.

In his Prologue to the book, Tomasko writes that many corporations have used downsizing practices, but they have not dealt with deeper structural and organizational problems. He knows it is not possible for him to come up with specific solutions for every corporation's problems, but he does suggest a "process corporations and their managers can use to move the organization from where it is now to where they feel it needs to be" (1).

Tomasko says that there are corporations in the world today which are still using structures from the nineteenth century to try to deal with problems of the twenty-first century. He wants to have leaders and workers of corporations completely rethink the way they do business, the way they manage, the way they take part in the organization of the corporation.

The book, therefore, is written for "two audiences: those with the power to bring abou

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the real world" (20). Tomasko points out that it is not only a matter of what to do, it is also how to do it. For example, it is clear that downsizing is needed for companies that have grown too big to make quick decisions and be flexible in putting those decisions into action. However, a bad downsizing can hurt the company in long-lasting ways. For example, Exxon downsized, but it cut "muscle" as well as "fat," cutting research and development at a time when it needed to expand that division. It is necessary to downsize and resize the right things and leave others alone or even expand where needed. One interesting aspect of Tomasko's analysis is his ideas on dual perspective. The company planner can become stuck with one perspective so that he cannot see as clearly what he is doing as he could at the beginning of the rethinking process. Here again the approach of the architect is useful: At times during the design process architects stand back from their detailed drawings and look at the structure they are planning as a whole, as might a bystander walking by. . . . Similarly, dual perspectives are essential when planning the restructuring of a corporation. Many reorganization efforts flounder because they take an excessiv
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Approximate Word count = 2037
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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