THE ART OF ALIGNMENT

A detailed study of how corporate leaders can measure and achieve “alignment.”

Debut author and Infinity Systems CEOJohnson observes that an organization’s alignment, defined as a harmony between its design, strategy, and culture, is critical to its ultimate success. Every organization suffers from some “alignment gaps” that exist “between where an organization is and where it wants to be to achieve its mission,” he says, and the consequences of such gaps can be dire. They can include increased employee discontent and turnover, miscommunication between various departments, and a general mistrust of management. The author says that his inability to find a way to reliably measure misalignment led him to devise one of his own, which he created in consultation with several other industry professionals and academics. Johnson’s metric identifies nine “pillars of alignment” through the use of a 100-question survey. The pillars themselves—including vision, leadership, communication, and teamwork—cover well-traversed ground, although Johnson’s synopsis of them is helpfully lucid. He effectively draws upon his own experience as a vice president at Medtronic, one of the world’s largest medical device companies,to provide concrete, actionable illustrations of much of his counsel. The mountain of literature on leadership is constantly growing, and like many other works in the genre, Johnson’s makes use of lots of lists and reductive formulas, which are often useful but not original. His optimism also results in the improbable claim that “anyone can become a great leader when they’re willing to pay the price”—paradoxically linking leadership to obedience of rules. Even so, corporate executives are likely to find this to be a valuable primer.

A familiar but thorough and accessible management treatise.