Designing Organizations: Strategy, Structure, and Process at the Business Unit and Enterprise Levels, 3rd Edition

Chapter 6

The Reconfigurable Functional Organization

The previous chapters have discussed single-business strategies that require cross-functional, lateral processes for their implementation. In this chapter, we examine a product differentiation strategy where product and other advantages do not last very long. The company uses an organization design that I called “reconfigurable” (Galbraith, 1997). Others have called the design an example of dynamic capabilities (Barreto, 2010) where the company combines and recombines its capabilities to create advantages. The company uses a functional structure as its foundation and then employs extensive lateral processes to reconfigure itself.

Every company needs an organization that changes as quickly as ...