Why do some businesses thrive whilst many more struggle and fail? A key reason and focus of this book is strategic alignment. Superior strategic alignment enables McDonald's, for example, to serve over 70 million customers a day around 1% of the global population and dominate its industry, as it has done for decades. McDonald's winning formula is tight alignment of its strategy, organisational capabilities, resources and management systems all arranged systematically to support its long-term purpose.
Most executives today know their enterprises should be managed in this 'aligned' way. The challenge is that executives tend to focus on only one aspect of what makes their enterprise effective (either their strategy, capabilities, resources or management systems), to the exclusion of the others. What really matters for performance is how they all fit together. The reality is that there are thousands of organisations globally who are operating well below their potential and getting by because they are not aligned. This book aims to change that.
