Designing the Customer-Centric Organization: A Guide to Strategy, Structure, and Process

"Jay Galbraith is one of the world's premier experts in organization design, having vast knowledge of both the theory and practice of creating sustainable competitive advantage. P&G's new organization structure is producing significant competitive advantage, and uses many of the concepts of customer-centricity detailed by Jay."
--Keith E. Lawrence, director of human resources, Global Beauty, P&G

"In a world where business success or failure is increasingly dependent on a company’s ability to align its resources around the customer, this book is a must-read that describes in very practical terms how large organizations can cope with this added dimension."
--Gerard J. Kleisterlee, president and CEO, Royal Philips Electronics

"Galbraith provides an excellent framework for navigating through the complex organization decisions and process required to successfully lead an enterprise from product to customer centricity."
--Vincent Roche, vice president, Global Sales, Analog Devices Inc.

"Jay Galbraith has once again written a path-breaking book on organizational design. He has put the customer squarely in focus, and developed a new paradigm for the design of effective organizational based on this. Thus, a strong sense of relevant organizational purpose is achieved, based on creating value vis-à-vis the customer. A landmark book."
--Peter Lorange, president, International Institute for Management Development, Lausanne, Switzerland

Designing the Customer-Centric Organization offers today's business leaders a comprehensive customer-centric organizational model that clearly shows how to put in place an infrastructure that is organized around the demands of the customer. Written by Jay Galbraith (the foremost expert in the field of organizational design), this important book includes a tool that will help determine how customer-centric an organization is—light-level, medium-level, complete-level, or high-level—and it shows how to ascertain the appropriate level for a particular institution. Once the groundwork has been established, the author offers guidance for the process of implementing a customer-centric system throughout an organization. Designing the Customer-Centric Organization includes vital information about structure, management processes, reward and management systems, and people practices.

Designing the Customer-Centric Organization is based on a three-year research study with McKinsey Organization Design Practice. Jay Galbraith studied fifteen companies that managed organizational complexity around customer demands. The book is filled with illustrative case studies from a variety of these successful organizations—IBM, Nokia Networks, Procter & Gamble, Citibank—that have made the transition to corporate reinvention and putting the customer first.