The Power of Alignment

"The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing!"

"We have learned that outstanding executives do not simply inherit a culture; rather, they proactively create a self-aligning and self-sustaining culture in their organizations."

"Like magnetism, alignment is a force. It coalesces and focuses an organization and moves it forward."

"Because TQM focused on cycle time and defect reduction without a clear link to strategy, senior managers often failed to make the ongoing commitment critical to any TQM effort."

"Alignment is not about the management of quality. It is about the quality of management."

"By starting on day one with three goals that are in continual dynamic tension, it forced us to continually think about simultaneously achieving all three."

"There is an old American Indian saying: God gave to each people a cup of clay. From the cup they drank their lives."

"Kmart's decline during the first half of the 1990s is symptomatic of a problem that afflicts many companies today."

"The need for companies to reengineer is in many aspects a consequence of past failures to make small, manageable adjustments on an ongoing basis."

"Vertical alignment energizes people, provides direction, and offers opportunity for involvement."

"It's necessary that people work together across varying activities and functions, but it is also necessary that they work on the right things."

"With both the vertical and horizontal dimensions aligned, your strategy and your people are synchronized with customer focus and process capabilities."

"Good managers, like good pilots, understand that some measures are more important than others, and they concentrate on these."

"The next time you get on an elevator, ask the person on your left or right three questions after the door closes: What is the strategy of this organization? What do you do? and How does what you do support the strategy?"

"Organizational pathologies, like their biological counterparts, have symptoms and causes."

"A company that loses touch with its customers, competitors, and business environment because it sees itself as the environment is a dead man walking."

"To deploy strategy rapidly and effectively from top to bottom, we recommend a framework called PDR, an ongoing cycle of planning, deployment, and review."

"Organizations that do not listen to changing customer requirements are left behind by competitors that do."

"One proven method for assuring both enrichment and commitment is the Japanese technique of catchball."

"Deployment gets strategy down to the ground."

"The review process helps senior executives monitor progress toward actualizing the company's strategy and assists middle managers and employees in refining their activities and energizing processes."

"Horizontal alignment infuses the concerns of the customer into everything the organization does."

"The ultimate process improvement, the Valhalla of horizontal alignment, is the situation in which external suppliers and external customers are actually part of the process."

"The self-aligning company has an 'invisible hand' of culture and systems that keeps everyone in the organization doing the right things right."

"What is needed are measures that align everyone with the intentions of the business and with the key goals of their respective departments."

"Every organization has a culture, and that culture, for better or worse, is largely determined by what its leaders have chosen to measure and to reinforce with incentives."

"Make sure that everyone understands the company's measures and how they tie into the main thing."

"It is not surprising to us that the aligned companies we have described in this book all operate in combatlike environments where competition is intense, change is rapid, and no one knows what the future will look like."

"Getting to alignment doesn't just happen."

"It's critical to find good examples, to honor them and celebrate them because you can come up with all the theory in the world, but it doesn't resonate unless you can look to specific examples."

"Make information readily available to everyone and avoid the tendency to control information."