How effectively aligned is your organization? That is—are all your departments pulling in roughly in the same direction? When one department has a customer problem, are other departments willing to step in and help? Or are your departments like little states in the Austro-Hungarian empire, lobbing grenades at each other?

An unaligned organization makes it almost impossible to be responsive to a customer request or problem. This is because cross-departmental processes can be at best clumsy and at worst unworkable.  And who is trapped in this lack of alignment? Your account managers, who in some cases have to walk customer requests/solutions through your organization.

Every minute your account managers spend making up for an unaligned organization is a minute that could be used to uncover new opportunities for mutual value. JSperry