Corporations are collections of people with different attitudes, values, interests, and ways of expressing themselves. Mission statements, strategies, rules and regulations for conduct, evaluation, and reward are supposed to smooth out the differences and help all the people who make up an organization march together in pursuit of a common goal.
This balancing act works most of the time, and those that are superb at it have a greater chance of overall success if they can get a host of other things right. Those that are seriously or chronically out of balance end up relegated to sub-optimal performance or worse.
Case in point: the alignment between information technology and the business. I've argued for many years in this column that manufacturers and other organizations are not getting a maximum return from their IT investments because of cultural, political, and other factors, including organizational inability to fully absorb and use IT.
A new survey by the Society for Information Management (SIM), an organization of more than 3,600 senior IT executives, underscores the persistence of the alignment problem.