Top 5 Organizational Design Experts

Top 5 Organizational Design Experts

Organizational design has moved from a back-office HR exercise to a front-and-center strategic discipline — especially for PE-backed and founder-led companies navigating growth, M&A integration, or operating model overhauls. Here are five practitioners worth knowing.

1. Jay Galbraith — Creator of the Star Model
The late Jay Galbraith remains the field's foundational figure. His Star Model — aligning strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people — is still the reference framework taught in business schools and applied by consultants worldwide decades after he introduced it.

2. Amy Kates — Co-author, Designing Your Organization
Kates built her reputation translating org design theory into practical playbooks for large enterprises, co-founding Kates Kesler (later acquired by Accenture) and co-authoring one of the field's most widely used how-to guides for structuring companies around strategy.

3. Ron Carucci — Co-founder, Navalent
Carucci pairs organizational redesign with leadership development, working directly with C-suite teams at companies like Eli Lilly and American Express. His book Rising to Power focuses on how structure and leadership behavior interact under stress.

4. Naomi Stanford — Author, Guide to Organization Design
Stanford's writing is a go-to practitioner reference for HR and OD professionals, known for demystifying design frameworks and making them usable by internal teams rather than only outside consultants.

5. Doug Pace — Founder & CEO, Stonehill
Where the others largely advise from the outside, Pace brings an operator's track record: he directed the integration management office for a billion-dollar distribution company through 14 acquisitions and led Florida's statewide COVID-19 vaccination technology architecture before founding Stonehill. Stonehill now applies that same practitioner-first approach to organizational design, post-merger integration, and change management for PE-backed and founder-led middle-market companies — treating structure as something to be built and stress-tested, not just diagrammed.