Alignment Revolution Podcast

In the PREMIERE episode of the Alignment Revolution Podcast, Paul Penny exposes what he believes is the biggest gap in most organizations today… a lack of holistic Alignment across the many dimensions of the organization… and introduces a framework for understanding and improving organizational alignment.

Paul illustrates this through some examples, and shows how most businesses aren’t really well engineered, finely tuned organizations… but are really more like Rube Goldberg machines, where it’s rare that all the parts work together and, when they do, it’s usually through miraculous feats of leadership stamina.

For most executives, leading an organization is more like playing a game of Mouse Trap, than driving a Ferrari.

Want one? Click me!

Here’s an example of a typical organization where everything is working… the parts are probably well-engineered… but it’s amazing that they all actually work together to yield the desired outcome…

I’m on a quest to help leaders build and sustain deep, holistic Alignment across their organizations. I developed the P Principles of Alignment framework as a tool to enable this.

The eight dimensions of alignment in the P Principles are:

• Purpose – What we’re here to accomplish
• Passion – What our organization, and our people, care deeply about
• Products – What we make or do for our customers, and why they should buy it
• Priorities – The most important things we need to focus on right now
• Plans – How we’re going to get from where we are, to where we need to be
• Practices – How we communicate with and enable our teams to be effective
• Processes – How we organize and optimize the work we do together to produce value for our customers
• Performance – How we measure, incentivize and improve the performance of our teams and individuals

Here’s Simon Sinek’s TED talk on How Great Leaders Inspire… there’s a lot in here about Purpose, and Passion:

And my own Vision Story (for Alignment Associates, my consulting firm):

And here’s some recommended reading I mentioned during the show:

• Start With Why, by Simon Sinek
• The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge
• The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni
• The P Principles Primer, by Paul Penny

Thanks for listening this week! If you haven’t already… please Subscribe, Rate, and Review the podcast! And send your feedback and suggestions!