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Does your company fully comply with your vision? If you have doubts, you should read "Total Alignment: Tools and Tactics to Streamline Your Organization." This book provides a comprehensive framework for every step you need to take to turn your vision of a dusty document on your desktop into a powerful and strategically competitive reality.
Building a company that completely aligns everything around its purpose and vision seems like a dream, but Total Alignment: Tools and Tactics to Streamline Your Organization Emphasizes that this can be a reality . The book guides readers through all the major steps they must go through to achieve total alignment in every area of their business.
What is the purpose of total alignment?
To become a company totally in sync with its goal, you must know what alignment looks like. As shared in Total Alignment a company that is totally aligned with its vision and mission has the following characteristics:
- Common Objective and Consistent Actions
- Clearly defined mission, vision and goals
- Clearly defined areas of responsibility
- Open and Cross-Functional Communication
- Empowerment at all levels
Compare the above characteristics to the features of a business out of alignment:
- Fuzzy goal and incoherent actions
- Mission, vision or ill-defined objectives
- Unclear areas of responsibility
- Silos
- Rumors and complaints
To become the company with the characteristics of "alignment", the book identifies four key areas where alignment must occur. These four domains are:
- Vertical: Alignment from top to bottom of the chain of command
- Horizontal: Alignment between teams and departments
- Jurisdiction: Harmonization of Jurisdiction and Responsibility
- Compensation: Alignment Between Reward and Effort
Total Alignment provides tools to measure the alignment of your business from the general level to the individual level. It starts with your company's vision, providing practical ways to break down a vision statement into measurable goals. From there, it covers alignment at all levels of the company, from the CEO's mission statement to the employee performance report. The book's ultimate strategy is to link each action to the vision.
Many companies create high vision statements, but fail to pursue their vision because something opposes it. They create departments that become silos. They are distracted in day-to-day communication and forget about their mission. Becoming aligned is not a matter of creating a vision and then letting things happen. Becoming aligned is a matter of establishing a vision and ensuring that what you have planned to do is happening.
Dr. Riaz Khadem is the founder and CEO of Infotrac, a strategy consulting company that he founded in 1984. Khadem began his career in the academic field but eventually started his own business consulting based on his expertise in strategy. He is also co-author of the book "One Page Management".
Co-author Linda Khadem is Executive Vice President and General Counsel at Infotrac.
What's better for full alignment?
Many leaders often create a vision statement for their business and then leave the accumulated dust as the daily routine takes over. This situation is avoided with Total Alignment because the book centers all around the vision since the assessment of your front-line employees up to the executive compensation structure. This continual reinforcement of vision is a simple but powerful thing for a business of any size.
If everything in your business is based on your vision, it is much easier to stay aligned with that vision.
What could have been done differently?
Total Alignment is an incredible guide to linking your company's vision to actual results, but it takes time to get used to it. The book has its own system of reports and terminology, such as Critical Success Factor (CSF) and Critical Management Factor (CMF). These are simple concepts, but they can be new to your business. Implementation is the key factor for this to happen. Full Alignment covers this topic in Chapter 14, but this chapter may need to be expanded.
Why read the total alignment?
Total Alignment is the kind of book you need when you are ready to improve your game as a business leader. It offers the opportunity to build your entire business around your vision, something that seems obvious but gets lost in everyday activities. In Total Alignment authors share simple tools (vision tree, strategy tree, dashboard, focus report, etc.) that build this vision and transform it into reality that you can measure and improve . If you, as a business leader, see a gap between your company's vision and your everyday reality, this book offers a complete and comprehensive system to solve this problem.