Partial book profile
Designing Organizations
A prescriptive guide to strategic organization design that shows how different business and portfolio strategies require different, aligned combinations of structure, processes, rewards, and people—captured in the Star Model—across business-unit and enterprise levels.
The full book profile is not available yet.
What it’s about
Designing Organizations distills Jay Galbraith's decades of research and consulting into a practical, top-down method for building high-performing organizations. Starting from the premise that different strategies lead to different organizations, the book uses the Star Model—strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people—as a holistic framework for aligning design choices. It traces companies from single-business functional start-ups through related and unrelated diversification, network and reconfigurable forms, and value-adding conglomerates and synergy portfolios, using vivid cases (Nike, IBM, Disney, GE, BMW, RBC, Danaher) to show how lateral processes, integrators, matrix structures, and partnerships coordinate increasingly complex work. It closes by examining how big data and real-time decision making may create a new organizational dimension. For any leader entrusted with stewardship of a complex institution, this book explains not just what to organize but how to align every design lever so people can excel rather than merely cope.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A senior leader or general manager entrusted with the stewardship of an organization who wants to build a high-performing enterprise that excels at executing its strategy.
- The problem
- Their organization has grown more complex and is misaligned with its strategy and stakeholder environment, so it cannot serve customers effectively. They feel that 'doing what comes naturally' and relying on good people is no longer enough, and they are confused about how to organize amid rising complexity and constant change.
- The plan
- Clarify your strategy: decide what to do, where to play, and how to win.
- Use the Star Model to design structure, processes, rewards, and people as an aligned whole.
- Match lateral processes—voluntary, e-coordination, formal groups, integrators, or matrix—to your coordination needs.
- As you diversify, choose the right portfolio structure and define how the corporate center adds value.
- Build reconfigurability and real-time decision capability to compete when advantages are temporary.
- The payoff
- An aligned, high-performing organization where people excel and get consistent messages about desired behavior. · The ability to coordinate complex, interdependent work rapidly and to reconfigure as strategy shifts. · A corporate center that adds genuine economic value to its portfolio of businesses.
See our guide
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Additional reading
- Strategy and Structure · Alfred Chandler
This book establishes the foundational principle of the entire text: that a company's strategy is the primary driver of its organizational structure and evolution.
- The Discipline of Market Leaders · Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema
Provides the framework for the three types of single-business strategies discussed in the book: cost-centric (operational excellence), product-centric (product leadership), and customer-centric (customer intimacy).
- Corporate Level Strategy · Michael Goold, Andrew Campbell, and Marcus Alexander
Cited as a key source for understanding how corporate centers can and should add value to their portfolio of businesses, a central theme of the book's second half.
- Clock Speed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage · Charles Fine
Explains the concept of temporary competitive advantages and the dynamics of shifting industry value chains, which provides the rationale for the 'reconfigurable' and 'network' organization models.
Featured in these guides
- The Behavioral Science Underneath It All →Pole in “Designed Structure Versus Emergent Order”
- Build A People Analytics Function →Pole in “Designed Structure Versus Emergent Order”
- Design The Organization And Change It →Pole in “Designed Structure Versus Emergent Order”
- Study People And Organizations With Scientific Rigor →Pole in “Designed Structure Versus Emergent Order”
- Do Research That Holds Up →Pole in “Designed Structure Versus Emergent Order”
- Design Surveys People Answer Honestly →Pole in “Designed Structure Versus Emergent Order”
- Understand What Drives Individual Performance →Pole in “Designed Structure Versus Emergent Order”
Where other books disagree
Co-cited books
- Obedience to Authority (Perennial Classics)
- Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition · Dan Ariely
- Organization Gap Kemball Cook
- Scale Geoffrey West
- Thinking and Reasoning_ A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) · Very Short Introductions
- The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers
- Thinking, Fast and Slow · Daniel Kahneman
- High Output Management · Andrew S. Grove