Designing Organizations: Strategy, Structure, and Process at the Business Unit and Enterprise Levels, Third Edition

This Third Edition of the groundbreaking book Designing Organizations offers a guide to the process of creating and managing an organization (no matter how complex) that will be positioned to respond effectively and rapidly to customer demands and have the ability to achieve unique competitive advantage. This latest edition includes fresh illustrative examples and references, while the foundation of the book remains the author's popular and widely used Star Model.

• Includes a comprehensive explanation of the basics of organization design
• Outlines a strategic approach to design that is based on the Star Model, a holistic framework for combining strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people
• Describes the different types of single-business, functional organizations and focuses on the functional structure and the cross-functional lateral processes that characterize most single-business organizations.
• Features a special section on the effects of big data on organization design, and whether or not it will result in a new dimension of organizational structure

Highlighting the social technologies used to coordinate work flows, products, and services across the company, this new edition of Designing Organizations brings theory to life with a wealth of examples from such well-known companies as Disney, Nike, IBM, and Rovio (Angry Birds) to show how various kinds of organization designs operate differently.

About the Author

Jay R. Galbraith, an internationally recognized expert on strategy and organization design, is the founder and president of Galbraith Management Consultants, a consulting firm that specializes in solving strategy and organizational design challenges across corporate, business unit, and international levels.

Galbraith is a former business school professor who served on the faculty of the Sloan School of Management at MIT and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a director of TruePoint, a management consulting firm based in Boston, as well as an affiliated research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California and professor emeritus at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. He also holds a top-secret security clearance in the US government.

With more than forty-five years of research and practical experience, Galbraith’s extensive knowledge stems from a background in information processing systems, chemical engineering, and organizational behavior. As the original creator of the widely used Star Model and the front-back organization structure, he transforms organizations across a broad span of industries, including consumer goods, manufacturing, health care, financial services, and telecommunications.

He is the author of dozens of published research papers and books. His most recent book is Designing Matrix Organizations That Actually Work (2009). Designing the Customer-Centric Organization (2005), Designing the Global Corporation (2000), and other publications are the result of hands-on experiences working in companies confronting these design issues. Galbraith’s theories on gaining a significant competitive advantage through organization design and customer-centricity have been implemented by top-level executives throughout the world.

As a testament to his ability to combine theory grounded in practical experience, Galbraith was selected by the Academy of Management as the 2011 Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner Award winner.

Galbraith speaks frequently at conferences worldwide and has received acclaim for delivering his extensive knowledge of global organization design in a clear, concise manner that audiences find informative and educational. He earned his doctor of business administration from Indiana University.