How We Serve You : White Papers
From the Boardroom to the Shop Floor and Back:
A Framework for Achieving Organizational Alignment
By Norma S. Simons
Introduction: The Power of Alignment
The primary goal of management is to create value for its customers, shareholders, and employees by executing well-defined strategic objectives. In the past, with enough time, organizations could make incremental changes and adjust to the operating environment. Today we realize that this approach is wasteful as without a focus, individuals work at cross-purposes and processes are sub-optimized, resulting in the inability to achieve substantive growth and a forward momentum.
What is needed is a framework for alignment that will enable the organization to be flexible and to respond rapidly and consistently to the changes in the environment. Organizational alignment creates tremendous power as the entire workforce is focused on the main direction with little dissipation of energy on areas that do not contribute to the strategy.
