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In Thoughtware® Change the Thinking & the Organization Will Change Itself, Hughes and Kirby provide a complete methodology that helps you shift your organization's thinking patterns from the old paradigm based on departmentalization, division of labor, span of control and point of authority to the powerful new context of knowledge, performance measurement, time to action and allowment. New Thoughtware® is the platform needed in order for knowledge workers to emerge, grow and impact their organizations in the 21st century.

Thought is the ancestor of all action. People's thinking is the basis for everything they do and all behavior is rooted in thought. The sum of people's thinking and their collective interaction is the mastermind of the organization's performance. Change the Thoughtware® and the organization will change itself and create an unmatched capability to handle the future - whatever it is.

Thoughtware® transcends change and creates a new context in which any and all change efforts have the optimum opportunity for success. With new Thoughtware® people can build a platform on which management process and change grow and renew as a natural corollary of their thinking and interaction.

The analogy between Thoughtware® and software is intentional because just as software is critical in the performance of computers and must continually be upgraded, it is also true of people's Thoughtware®. Our Thoughtware® is the catalytic converter of information into knowledge.

Why this book is for you!

• It doesn't tout just another new "flavour of the month" management concept or some leadership dogma, but helps you effect lasting change.
• It discloses why so many prescriptions for change aren't sustainable without changing the underlying fundamental thinking in an organization.
• It explores and challenges the inventory of old thinking, assumptions and precepts entrenched in our current organizations.
• It describes the cornerstones of the new Thoughtware® platform and illustrates, in practical terms, how new Thoughtware® can generate order of magnitude change at every level.
• It gives every employee the insight into how important it is to change the way we think before trying to change the way the organization runs.

In their first book, management theoreticians Kirby and Hughes argue that most management initiatives, such as TQM and reengineering, are at best peripheral. They maintain that real change in organizations can occur only when the contextual underpinning itself is transformed. To borrow from genetics, they claim that Thoughtware® --the organizational DNA-- needs to be altered.

While not an original idea (cf. W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, 1982), Kirby and Hughes establish the weaknesses of management measurement tools currently in place, and they advocate a total-capital approach linking financial capital, tangible assets, and intellectual capital. A number of other authors have intimated similar approaches, but Kirby and Hughes provide an intellectual framework with clear contemporary examples that should be of benefit to management practitioners.

Steven Silkunas,
Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, Philadelphia

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