Alignment

Alignment is the key to victory. (Alignment is also the key to recruiting great people - post on this coming soon...stay tuned!) Alignment takes courage. Most leadership teams won't do it. I see the lack of alignment all the time. I saw this when I was SVP at HotJobs and the polite people from Yahoo! came in to run and transform our triple digit growth into single digit growth. They created so much confusion and malignment between what was decided in Sunnyvale and what New York was allowed to do. I see it when A+ talent come in to interview with us from "top companies" with big brand names here in New York, NY. They are often deflated from this agony of non-alignment. They carry still their hopes, dreams, values and beliefs. They aspire for greatness still. They are tired of being frustrated. They want to execute. They want to make an impact. They don't want bureaucracy or political disarray or dysfunctional leadership -- all symptions of this non-alignment between what leaders "say" is important (external measures) and the reality of their half-hearted actions. It crushes their hope of achieving external success. I feel their pain. It demotivates and eventually brings business to a grinding slowness. The A+ talent leave for a place where they can thrive...we accomodate as many as we can.

In the war for business success -- product launches, deadlines, project kickoffs, customer acquisition, conversion, product lifecycles, costs, features and functionality are the battles for market share and just some of the measures of external success.

You cannot have external world success without inner world alignment.

The inner world being composed of your hopes, dreams, values & beliefs.

This holds true for individuals as much as teams or working groups.

Understanding the inner world is not enough, it's important to reconcile and align the inner world drivers with external factors like deadlines and resource constraints.

Great leaders help their people bridge the gap between the inner & external worlds...they contextualize the victory...

In business and in war it is the indefatigable pursuit of high victory and creating alignment between our hopes/dreams and what we are prepared to sacrifice in order to achieve these external measures as if our lives depended on it that makes all the difference in the world. Because in the final analysis, if it's not worth fighting for or not worth doing right...then shouldn't you be doing something else...?