Organizational Design

Making organizational design work

Designing major organizational changes is a complex and high-stakes process. The general rule is that structure should follow strategy, but it is often challenging to ignore the people and personalities that you see on a daily basis. L.E.K. has developed a systematic and objective organizational design process that ensures our clients create powerful organizations that truly enable strategy execution.

The best organization designs are co-created with key constituents and stress-tested in the marketplace with real-life scenarios to validate the design and build alignment for effective implementation.

We have developed a comprehensive framework to address our clients’ organizational design needs.

L.E.K. organizational design framework

Choices across these six dimensions must be integrated, a challenge for many companies. Typical issues include a lack of efficiency or effectiveness:

• Efficiency issues result in higher costs, e.g., in overhead, manufacturing or cost of sales
• Effectiveness issues result in poor decision-making, lack of accountability and slow processes

We support our clients by taking them through this integrated set of choices, and closely linking organizational choices with business portfolio and strategic positioning.

Our OEX Diagnostic Tool provides deep insight on the effectiveness of the organization today, which can be leveraged to inform these choices.

Helping clients improve organizational design

L.E.K. has worked with a broad range of companies to implement effective organizational design solutions:

• Redesigned global sales and marketing functions, as well as back-office and corporate support, for a leading packaging services company, as part of the acquisition of a competitor. The redesign helped capture synergies, better positioning the combined company to serve a global customer base. Read more

• Worked with a top-three global food-ingredients business to develop a new distribution strategy that increased focus on higher-value opportunities and migrated low-value customers to online channels. Read more

• Optimized an organizational redesign for a leading global player in the food-ingredients industry by creating global support functions. Read more