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

Studies have proved that sales to existing customers are more profitable than sales to new customers. Today's business leaders are recognizing that the new foundation for profitability is establishing loyal, long-term customer relationships. If industries are to thrive in the 21st century, they must have the ability to do business based on what the customer wants.

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.

Jay R. Galbraith is a senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California. He is professor emeritus at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. Galbraith is the author of numerous books, including Designing Organizations, Designing the Global Corporation, and Tomorrow's Organization, all from Jossey-Bass.