Organization design has been a focus of research and teaching at the Center for Effective Organization (CEO) for the past 30 years. Our work has consisted of numerous studies that have explored, defined, and assessed new organizational forms and corporate structures that have spanned decades in which the economy has transitioned from the industrial era to today’s knowledge-based, diverse, and rapidly changing global economy.

CEO researchers have contributed foundational research on high performance systems; team-based organizations; self-forming and planned networks; inter-organizational designs, organizing for knowledge leadership; customer focused designs; global designs; and designs for agility and sustainability.

A fundamental tenet of our research is that organizations must consider the impact of their design choices not only on business performance, but also on employees, customers, and the communities and societies in which they operate. Since 2008, we have added a time dimension to the understanding of organization design, as organizations are having to confront the challenges of sustainability and agility.

A number of corporations have established partnerships with CEO to help them design more extensive in-house organization design capabilities. These partnerships may entail a mixture of sending multiple people to gain organization design certificates in our public programs, in-house tailored design workshops, shadow consulting to some flagship organization design projects, the development of company specific cases, organization design cases, webinars and other virtual educational offerings.