Got Alignment?

Business success requires alignment on two levels – strategic and operational. In this article, Trevor and Varcoe provide a thorough examination of strategic alignment. It is indeed the first level of alignment required for business success.

Based on our experience with clients at Luminas, we believe operational alignment is equally important. Operational alignment around the key drivers of growth is essential to ensure leaders and resources are focused on the specific things that have are truly driving growth for your business (these priorities will shift over time and the combination of growth drivers vary from one business to business – even within the same company).

After your business is strategically aligned, we advise examining its operational alignment as well. In fact, the Luminas Growth Driver Illuminator was developed precisely for this purpose. It’s the first step in assessing the alignment of your leadership team – both to gaining agreement on business growth priorities, and measuring the team’s current level of confidence in selecting those priorities. Learn more and take the assessment by going here.

originally published by Harvard Business Review (Jonathan Trevor & Barry Varcoe)

“Most executives today know their enterprises should be aligned. They know their strategies, organizational capabilities, resources, and management systems should all be arranged to support the enterprise’s purpose. The challenge is that executives tend to focus on one of these areas to the exclusion of the others, but what really matters for performance is how they all fit together.

Consider McDonald’s. What does it take to be able to serve over 1% of the world’s population — more than 70 million customers — every day and in virtually every country across the world? Fanatical attention to the design and management of scalable processes, routines, and a working culture by which simple, stand-alone, and standardized products are sold globally at a predictable, and therefore manageable, volume, quality, and cost. Maximizing economies of scale lies at the heart of McDonald’s product-centric business model. Efficiency is built into the design of its winning organization in the form of formalized hierarchies of performance accountability, a high division of labor, routinization of specialist tasks, and teamwork at the point of sale. McDonald’s has been the market leader in its sector for decades.

This is what enterprise alignment looks like…”

To continue reading, access the full article: Harvard Business Review