Amy Kates

Amy serves as a trusted advisor to business leaders in successful companies around the world, working with them to assess organizational issues, reshape structures and processes, and build depth of management capability. She is a skilled diagnostician and designer and helps her clients to understand organizational options and their implications, and to make sound decisions.

In addition to her consulting work, Amy is on the i4cp Thought Leader Consortium. She also teaches organization design in the Executive MBA program at the Executive School of Business in Denmark, at Ashridge Business School in the UK, and through Cornell University. She is also a Resource Partner to the Center for Effective Organizations at the Marshall School of Business at USC.

Amy Kates is a co-author, with Greg Kesler, of the book Bridging Organization Design and Performance: Five Ways to Activate a Global Operation Model (2015). She and Greg also co-authored the book Leading Organization Design: How to Make Organization Design Decisions to Drive the Results You Want (2010). Amy partnered with Jay Galbraith to write Designing Your Organization: Using the Star Model to Solve Five Critical Design Challenges (2007) and with Jay Galbraith and Diane Downey to write Designing Dynamic Organizations: A Hands-On Guide for Leaders at All Levels (2002). Amy has published numerous articles and book chapters on the topics of organization design and talent management. She is a past editor of the journal People & Strategy.

The organization design approach and tools Amy has developed with Jay Galbraith and Greg Kesler have become the standard internal design methodology used in dozens of major corporations around the world. Her article, “(Re)Designing the HR Organization,” was awarded the 2007 HRPS Walker Prize, and her ideas on emerging models for human resources have been used by leading companies as the basis for the design of their HR functions.

Amy began her career as a planner and Urban Fellow with New York City. She was formerly the principal of Downey Kates Associates. She has a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. Amy lives in New York City and is a board member of LEAD, an innovative after school program working to close the achievement gap for students in New York City.