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™ 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.
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Galbraith, J. R. (1971). Designing matrix organizations. Business Horizons, 14, 29–40.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Bill Joyce and Rob Kazanjian, who provided immensely thoughtful and helpful comments on her first draft. In addition, Roger Harvey provided a wonderfully rich description of Jay during their years as graduate students at Indiana University. And finally, she could not have produced this chapter without having spent 25 very fulfilling years with her business partner, soul mate, and husband, Jay.
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Galbraith, S. (2017). Jay R. Galbraith: Master of Organization Design – Recognizing Patterns from Living, Breathing Organizations. In: Szabla, D.B., Pasmore, W.A., Barnes, M.A., Gipson, A.N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52878-6_39
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