Jay R. Galbraith Memorial Project

Abstract

passed away on april 8, 2014. Jay was a leading authority on organization design, a founding member of the Organizational Design Community, and a valued contributor to the Journal of Organization Design. We invited Jay's colleagues from around the world to offer their comments on his work. The specific question we asked was: What ideas or insights regarding organization design have you obtained from the work of Jay Galbraith? as you will see from the comments below, Jay provided many valuable contributions to the field of organization design, and he was a caring, generous colleague. he will be greatly missed. Børge Obel Charles Snow Jay Galbraith was my friend and colleague at TruePoint, a management consulting firm I co-founded and that Jay was associated with as a Director. He was a giant in the field of organization design and effectiveness. Jay's information-processing theory of organizations was foundational. It provided an essential lens for understanding what makes organizations effective and an analytical framework for developing alternative organizational designs. Jay's work on matrix organizations was groundbreaking. He was the first to see that matrix designs were in the future of all complex, global, and customer-centric organizations that seek to move up the value chain to sell solutions. his grounded research informed academics and practitioners alike about the critical design features for a well-functioning matrix. Jay's genius was to anticipate, as he did most recently with big data, future business trends, find best-practice examples of organizational design solutions, and then provide an analysis of why and how those design solutions were effective answers to the trend. this in turn led him to develop sound and analytically rigorous recommendations for practitioners. Jay was the epitome of the scholar-practitioner working at the interface between theory and practice, a professional identity and style of knowledge creation of which we need more. In this regard, Jay's professional life is a model that all of us should try to emulate. It is why he was awarded the academy of Management's Scholar-Practitioner award. Jay died in the middle of an organization design consultation, of which Russ eisenstat and I were a part. Indeed, he had a call with the client planned for two days after he died. he had a book on big data in the works. Jay's identity was closely tied to his professional work, and this stirred a work ethic that fueled his many accomplishments as a researcher, theorist, and practitioner. More importantly, Jay was a great human being. Despite his world-class professional standing, he was a humble and collaborative professional colleague we should all emulate. Mike Beer Emeritus Professor, Harvard Business School Jay Galbraith was a rare individual. as an academic, he spoke to practitioners. as a practitioner, he spoke to academics. how was he able to do this? he began with the fundamentals of information processing which he developed early on. In his 1974 Interfaces article, he proposed that greater task uncertainty requires greater information processing for a given level of performance. The organizational design problem was to find an efficient balance between (a) the reduction of the need for information processing with slack resources or self