Jay Galbraith

Dr. Jay Galbraith was an internationally recognized expert on strategy and organization design. He founded Galbraith Management Consultants in 1978 to help companies manage the conflicting demands of matrix organizations, as well as solve strategy and organizational design challenges across corporate, business unit, and international levels.

Dr. Galbraith was a business school professor who served on the faculty of the Sloan School of Management at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a director of TruePoint, a management consulting firm based in Boston, as well as an Affiliated Research Scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California and Professor Emeritus at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

With more than 45 years of research and practical experience, Dr. Galbraith’s extensive knowledge came from his background in information processing systems, chemical engineering, and organizational behavior. As the original creator of the widely used Star Model™ and the Front-Back organization structure, Dr. Galbraith transformed organizations across a broad span of industries including consumer goods, manufacturing, health care, financial services and telecommunications, among others.

Dr. Galbraith authored dozens of published research papers and books, including his most recent release, “Designing Organizations,” (Jossey-Bass, 2014) which is the third edition of his foundational book. Several of his other books (Designing Matrix Organizations that Actually Work, Designing the Customer-Centric Organization and Designing the Global Corporation) are the result of hands-on experiences with companies confronting these design issues. Galbraith’s theories on gaining a significant competitive advantage through organization design and customer-centricity have been implemented by top-level executives in multinational corporations throughout the world.

As a testament to his ability to combine theory grounded in practical experience, Dr. Galbraith was selected by the Academy of Management as the 2011 Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner Award winner.