Part I: What is “Extreme Alignment” and what difference does it make?

Introduction

Consider this question: What good does it do to redesign an organization if the changes don’t enable it to survive?

So often we spend our time trying to reshape our organization’s culture, or restructure, or devise a new compensation scheme to fix the crisis of the day. But how often do we examine the whole system of organization in its ever-changing competitive environment and then align organizational elements to survive?

The importance of distinguishing between these two objectives was demonstrated to me at a conference some years ago.A presenter was sharing his company’s experiences with redesigning its operation to compete better against Japanese firms. Following many popular design trends of the day, he outlined how his company had restructured into a team system, initiated a new compensation plan, written a new mission statement, and increased its training budget. At the end of his presentation, I asked the question,“How has your redesign work helped you compete better against the Japanese firms?”

His answer was shocking, “Well, you can’t really compete against the Japanese.”

What good, then, was all of this organization design work?

Other similar filtration materials usually have been found by luck or accident rather than by design.

Until recently it has been impossible to create artificial capillaries with atomic-scale precision.

But now researchers Radha Boya and Nobel laureate Andre Geim have made the impossible possible. These researchers have removed strips in graphene (a flat layer of carbon one atom thick) to create Nano channels. These channels can carry fluids or gasses through them to accommodate a single molecule of water at a time, while filtering out salt, viruses, and bacteria that easily attach to water but are too big to fit through the 0.3 nanometer channel.

The implication of these seven principles is they are the standard for survival.The more challenging the environmental context, the more “extreme” the alignment with them must be.

For instance, to craft a company mission statement is an approximate alignment with “Purpose” in the above list. Extreme alignment means that individuals in all areas and at all levels intrinsically channel their efforts to fulfill the mission.Their channeling filters out dysfunctional and distracting traditions, obsolete assumptions, uninformed judgments from on high, or ideas like “we are good enough.”

Similarly,an organization chart may be in approximate alignment with “Mobilization.” But “atomic-scale precision” alignment means that individuals, regardless of where they fit in the organization chart, have the knowledge, skills, and commitment to solve any daily problem they face in their work.

And so forth.

In every industry today, there are leading companies who may not measure up to every one of these survival standards.As the environment changes and as competition becomes more challenging, these leaders must become extremely aligned in each of these seven areas or risk falling. Horst Schulze, the founding president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, would say after reading a stack of guest feedback letters,“We are by far the best hotel in the industry. But we are the best of a bad lot.”

Don’t take my word on all of this. Look at the numbers! Compare the Fortune Global top 100 companies lists for the past half century. In every decade approximately 50 per cent of the 100 have fallen off the list. Some of these powerful companies have even disappeared, either by being swallowed up by another enterprise or vanishing altogether.

A word of caution:the terms“extreme alignment” and “atomic-scale precision” should not be interpreted as a need for traditional re-engineering or the use of organizational micrometers. These labels drive one to think organizational improvements can be accomplished by the better design of technical things only. Redesigning a technical thing focuses only on that thing’s function. Synergy focuses on “intangibles” such as relationships between people in stakeholder groups in the ecosystem. Extreme alignment requires both technical advances and greater synergy between human stakeholders

For example: because people are so diverse, atomic- scale precision may mean that no two teams are designed exactly the same; leadership, support, decisiveness, and objectives may need to be different for different groups and individuals. Policies or grand organizational schematics alone cannot deliver atomic-scale precision for relationships.

As former Intel CEO Andy Grove said, “Whatever can be done, will be done. If not by incumbents, it will be done by emerging players. If not in a regulated industry, it will be done in a new industry born without regulation. Technological change and its effects are inevitable. Stopping them is not an option.”

•  Moving beyond task specialization to thinking of all tasks as part of a process. The bureaucracy model broke down a work process flow into discrete individual “jobs” that average people could handle. Thus, emerged assembly lines and similar innovations that reduced work to the smallest repeatable set of motions. While these technical breakthroughs did elevate organizational performance significantly at first, they also unintentionally moved one’s line of sight from fitting into the order of things to accomplishing only individual work objectives. In the past century other needs and high-tech tools have led to the imperative of optimizing whole processes, rather than each discrete step.