Jay R. Galbraith: Master of organization design - recognizing patterns from living, breathing organizations

Abstract

Jay Galbraith was the leading scholar and practitioner in the field of organization design. His early work focused on the amount, type, and complexity of information that an organization needed to process in order to get work done. Galbraith's information-processing model of organization design was influential among academic circles and became widely used in the corporate arena. In addition, he developed key concepts such as organization design as a prescriptive model, equifinality, strategy implementation the Star Model(tm) framework of organization design, the front-back organization, and lateral forms of organization - all of which are used today in the organization change process. Galbraith was unique among his academic colleagues in that his research derived primarily from the clients he advised. His gift was a rare ability to synthesize information and distill it down to useful and repeatable solutions to complex organizational challenges.