Turn Alignment into Connected Commitments

Early 2006. NxTV delivered digital entertainment to premium hotels, and the paid in-room movie business was under pressure. Investors brought me in to grow the company and deliver an exit, and the team and I agreed on the answer: more hotels. Then one weekend in Redondo Beach, with two babies in the house and a new Fios line, something clicked. What if we could treat every home like another hotel room? I took one of our set-top boxes home, worked with the engineering team, and by the end of the weekend we were sending encrypted content over the internet to the box in my living room, before Netflix launched streaming. Then things started to stall.

The management team was aligned on the vision. The controlling shareholder, a real estate investor who knew the hotel business, kept using his own channel to push for more hotels. The CFO, a co-founder with close ties to the leadership I had replaced, took concerns about the new direction to him, so the old channels kept operating. Growth meant more hotel contracts to him and a new market to us, and we had never agreed on what to prioritize, what to fund, or how much time we had. In August 2007 we reached a serious point with Comcast. The controlling shareholder wanted a higher valuation. Comcast declined and walked away, and the company now had to prove that valuation through execution with more capital than it had. Part of that is on me. Six months in, I had called the management team aligned. I never turned that alignment into a funding and priority agreement, in writing, with the people who controlled the capital. A CEO cannot execute a strategy the owners have not agreed to fund. The digital distribution strategy was never fully funded or executed, and the owners sold the business in 2011.

GoDaddy, Scottsdale, Arizona, the first strategic leadership team meeting after the Media Temple acquisition, about 80 people in the room. Blake Irving had been CEO for less than a year. He delivered the vision, and it was strong. The execution plan that connects the direction to each manager's work wasn't there yet. Everyone left that meeting and went right back to work. People defaulted to familiar work because no one had given them the tools to turn the strategy into their own priorities. I worked with the head of HR, Auguste Goldman, and the other HR executives to build a training program. Then two HR executives and I traveled to every GoDaddy office and trained over 600 managers on how their own goals connected to Blake's vision. What I could see was managers setting goals that connected upward to the vision. I can't separate the program's effect on business performance from everything else happening at GoDaddy. A sincere vision speech changes nothing until the local scoreboards change.

Nokia saw parts of the smartphone future early. Symbian was the foundation of its smartphone business, MeeGo was in development, and after choosing Windows Phone in February 2011 it still had to support Symbian, manage MeeGo, and build Lumia. Researchers Quy Huy and Timo Vuori, drawing on 76 interviews, found that fear shaped how information moved inside Nokia: some middle managers passed optimistic, filtered information upward. A ranked plan cannot help if the facts used to rank it are softened before they reach the people making the decision. Parallel bets are useful when each has a purpose, a resource limit, and a point at which leaders compare the evidence and choose. They become a problem when teams compete for the same people and funding without a shared decision rule.

Ask every senior leader to finish one sentence independently: this strategy means my team will start X, stop Y, and prioritize Z. Compare the answers before anyone negotiates common wording. Then write the direction on one page with Vision and Priorities, settle one resource conflict in the Priority Stack with the authorized resource owner, put the displaced work on the No List, and use the Alignment Translation Worksheet so each function names what changes in its work.

If you control the capital or sit with the people who do, put the priority and funding choice in writing before calling the team aligned: which business you will protect, which opportunity you will build, how much each receives, and what evidence will justify continuing or changing course. If you manage a team, take your own start, stop, and prioritize sentence to your manager. If you are carrying a priority nobody has funded or named, say so before it becomes a missed promise. If you lead, examine what happens to the person who brings you an unwelcome date. If you are the manager holding the unwelcome facts, put them in the open.

A working demo shows what is possible. It doesn't make a company.