Partial book profile

Leading Organization Design

A practical, five-milestone process for business leaders to make deliberate organization design decisions that translate strategy into executable capabilities, balanced power relationships, and the right talent.

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What it’s about

Leading Organization Design argues that in a world of complex, global, matrixed strategies, organization design has become an essential leadership competency rather than something that comes naturally. Drawing on forty years of consulting experience and building on the foundational work of Jay Galbraith, Walt Mahler, Robert Simons, and Dick Axelrod, Greg Kesler and Amy Kates offer a clear, scalable, five-milestone road map—Business Case and Discovery, Strategic Grouping, Integration, Talent and Leadership, and Transition. They equip leaders with concrete frameworks (the Star Model, the six design drivers, the strategy canvas, governance levers adapted from Simons's levers-of-control, the leadership pipeline, and the design charette) that marry the art and science of design while engaging the right people in the process. The book shows leaders how to define the real problem to solve, choose and blend basic structures, govern the inevitable matrix through balanced power, design and staff critical roles, and lead the transition all the way through—turning accumulated experience into applied wisdom and building organizations that competitors cannot easily copy.

The through-line

Who it’s for: A general manager, business leader, or HR/OD professional who wants to execute a complex strategy and build organizational capabilities that competitors can't easily copy.
The problem: A misaligned organization structure that creates barriers to execution, slow decisions, role confusion, and an inability to build the capabilities a new strategy demands. Feeling that they know change is needed but are unsure how to make the best design decisions, fearing they'll solve the wrong problem or lurch from one reorganization to another.
The plan: Build a business case: clarify strategic priorities, define the case for change through assessment, and set design criteria.
Choose a basic structure through strategic grouping using the six design drivers.
Tie the pieces together and allocate power through integration and governance levers.
Design and staff the critical leadership roles and define the work of the executive team.
Lead, measure, learn, and adjust through a deliberately paced transition.
The payoff: Aligned decision making against strategy with high consistency and speed. · Built differentiating capabilities that are difficult for competitors to copy. · Talent placed in the right roles and leaders grown through stretch experiences.

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Related profiles we’ve built

Additional reading

Designing Organizations / Designing Matrix Organizations That Actually Work · Jay Galbraith
The book identifies Galbraith as a founder of the field and states that his Star Model serves as the 'foundation of all our work'.
Levers of Control / Levers of Organization Design · Robert Simons
The authors explicitly adapt Simons's 'levers-of-control' model to create their 'Governance Levers' framework for managing power relationships in the matrix, a core concept in Milestone 3.
Blue Ocean Strategy · W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
The 'Strategy Canvas' tool, which is a key part of Milestone 1 for clarifying strategic priorities, is taken directly from this book.
The Leadership Pipeline · Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel
This book is the source of the Leadership Pipeline (or 'Crossroads') model, which is the primary framework used in Milestone 4 for designing leadership roles and levels.
Terms of Engagement: Changing the Way We Change Organizations · Richard Axelrod
The authors credit Axelrod with teaching them how to engage 'whole systems and large groups,' which is the methodological basis for the 'Design Charette' described in detail in the book.
Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution · Geoffrey Moore
Moore's archetypes of 'complex systems' versus 'volume operations' businesses are used as a framework for developing early design hypotheses in Milestone 2.
Requisite Organization · Elliott Jaques
Jaques's work on organizational layers and 'time span' of work complexity is presented as a key model for designing the vertical structure of an organization and avoiding unnecessary management layers.

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