Robert M. Tomasko's book Rethinking the Corporation: The Architecture of Change is a follow-up work to his earlier Downsizing: Reshaping the Corporation for the Future. Downsizing presented ideas on the need for streamlining the corporation to make it leaner, stronger and able to make quick changes to survive in the increasingly competitive future.
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 about change in their organization and those on the receiving end of these changes" (1-2). However, Tomasko is clearly writing more for those leaders who can make the changes necessary to meet the economic and organizational demands of the next century.
Tomasko takes an unusual and fascinating approach to the problems of the corporation--the approach that an architect would take toward a building. For example, the book is divided into three sections, Re...