Charles A. O’Reilly III

Charles A. O’Reilly III is a professor of management at Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research spans organizational behavior, leadership, culture, and organizational innovation and change.

With Michael L. Tushman, O’Reilly wrote The Ambidextrous Organization. Its accessible abstract describes an approach to pursuing established operations and exploratory work at the same time: exploratory units have distinct processes and structures, while senior leaders coordinate across them. This is a way to frame the tension between commitment and adaptation, not proof that the same design will succeed in every organization. For an article about strategic optionality, O’Reilly’s work helps explain why protecting new possibilities may require deliberate organizational design rather than an unfunded instruction to innovate.