Designing Your Organization: Using the STAR Model to Solve 5 Critical Design Challenges

by Amy Kates

Designing Your Organization is a hands-on guide that provides managers with a set of practical tools to use when making organization design decisions. Based on Jay Galbraith’s widely used Star Model, the book covers the fundamentals of organization design and offers frameworks and tools to help leaders execute their strategy. The authors address the five specific design challenges that confront most of today’s organizations:

·        Designing around the customer

·        Organizing across borders

·        Making a matrix work

·        Solving the centralization—and decentralization dilemma

·        Organizing for innovation

 

 

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been looking at this, on and off, for a while. This is a fairly good text that stands out in an undistinguished area. “Organization Design” sounds like an interesting area and it is one of the few areas in business writing where many of the standard recipes are agreed upon and have not changed much with the passage of time. Want to change an organization? Simple, decide on what you want to do. Then, specify the details of the change into some plan. It will encompass much more than simply changing the formal structure. Then implement the plan and see what happens. This will requires sustained active management over the course of an extended change period. It sounds like I am oversimplifying but this is the punchline.

Efforts to reduce this chain of events into a book, however, seriously err towards oversimplification and avoidance of tough questions. The particular problem is that of redefining the problem in the form of a solution. Your problem is that you are poor? The answer is simple - get money! Your organization is sluggish and unresponsive? The answer is simple - make it more active and more responsive! The real difficulty, of course, is how to do that.

In practice, organization design is hard. Many people have trouble managing themselves coherently over an extended period (a week; a month). Now imagine doing that for an organization employing hundreds if not thousands, extending over a large area, and comprising more areas of specialized knowledge than any single person can master.

So what makes the Kates book useful? For the general story, she teams with Jay Galbraith, who was one of the most established gurus in the area (he passed away in 2014). This means that the story line being presented here is a reasonable and well established one. By the way, the Galbraith STAR model refers to the need to manage five distinct organization design challenges: strategy, structure, people, rewards, processes. To this, Kates adds an emphasis on the matching of organizational capabilities to the relevant environment through the appropriate use of structure. Doing this well will require the active use of data analysis throughout the process. She does a good job in showing where actively analyzing changes can help in managing them. As important, she provides examples for her points. This is important so that the people managing a change can communicate it to others in the organization and to those with whom a firm must deal. This should be obvious but it is surprising how little it is done. She does not provide easy answers but the book is useful for showing the people who need to be involved in a design effort what they should be doing throughout the process.

As this area goes, that is a start.

[Paul, · Rating 3 out of 5]

Organizational design is complex. I hoped that this book would be more hands-on, but at least it gave me some theoretical handles on how to run a multi-national org / project.

A few of my favorite quotes:

P.141
In general, managers want centralization below them, so that they can have control and efficiency. But they also want decentralization above them, so that they can have freedom and autonomy.

P.102
But when it is not effectively deployed, the matrix introduces a significant cost: the diversion of management time from products and customers to internal negotiations. Rather than strengthen collaboration, it consumes valuable management attention that must be spent sorting out disagreements. Matrix is still a code word among many observers of organizational life for “cumbersome” and “overengineered.” The Economist, in a major feature, “The New Organisation,” in 2006, derided it as “the corset from which many companies are still trying to struggle free” (“The New Organisation,” 2006).

P.24
The four primary building blocks of organizational structure are function, product, geography, and customer. We also refer to these as structural dimensions.

[Nurlan Mustafayev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before organizations hire management consultancy firms like BGC, McKenzie, Bain, etc, to undertake a corporate reform project, they must ensure that their mid-level managers read this book. Understanding design principles internally first is essential. It will also allow for building more productive workstreams with such management consultancy firms.

[Fred Cheyunski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful Charts and Templates to Help Guide Organization Design - Galbraith and Kates summarize his classic organization design approach and concepts updating them to address 5 major issues. They relate the star model and the interdependencies between strategy, capabilities, structures, processes, people, and rewards. Their emphasis from the start is on ways strategy can be translated into design criteria. A model fundamental to many of us who have been involved with high performance organization design and implementation.

In succeeding chapters, the authors use the star model to treat each of the 5 major issues, i.e. (1) designing around the customer, (2) organizing across borders, (3) making a matrix work, (4) solving the centralization / decentralization dilemma, and (5) organizing for innovation. Within the chapters, they introduce examples and tools that are pertinent to the particular issue. In one instance, examples such as those related to a specialty chemical company, an HR organization and a bank are particularly helpful in explaining light, medium and intensive customer-centric designs. In another instance, charts such as those related to geographic options were illuminating in detailing cross border management alternatives.

The appendices and CD included offer a number of templates that can be further adapted for use such as those for business portfolio strategy and structural design options as well as for basic responsibility charting and simple competency assessments.

[Mohamed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very nice book discussing organizations design from 5 dimensions perspective: strategy, structure, processes, rewarding system, and people,

Also it discusses common organization design perspectives: centralization vs decentralization, matrix structure, and innovation perspectives.

[Manuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good set of advice if you want to know how to design an organization and the teams that work within it.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Theresa M. Oxley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on the fundamentals of organizational design. Set up workbook fashion, with worksheets in the book and on CD providing practical tools to help you through the design process.