The Art of Alignment - Interview with Art Johnson

The Art of Alignment - Interview with Art Johnson

Okay, so you talk about alignment in the book. You talk about how alignment results in measurable KPI changes. Then one of the most striking stories in your work with Medtronic and how you achieved double-digit growth in a flat sales environment. Can you tell us a little more about that? 

Art: So the overall market was flat and in order to grow, that means you got to go take market share. And that's a difficult thing to do when you already have 55% of the market share. So we had to really get busy, get creative and figure out specifically what we needed to do to perform at a higher level. 

So earlier on in my tenure at Medtronic, I was given some tools [00:02:00] by human resources, to just kind of measure where the employee base was- like employee satisfaction surveys, also employee engagement surveys. But Ken, I quickly realize that engagement is just one aspect of it, because at the end of the day, we have to be engaged in the right thing.

So that's where this idea of adding purpose to engagement to create this entity or this measurement called alignment and the entity in which we use to measure that is called orga metrics. So we began the process of measuring how aligned my organization was, since I had responsibility for sales and I had some ancillary support around it.

We had to figure out where we were and what we found was something startling. The further we got away from headquarters, the more disconnected or more misaligned we were, and it became pivotal to get greater levels of alignment throughout the organization.

 So we measured it. Brought my leadership team in, identified the areas of misalignment, and went to work on those things. And in about eight months measured again and found that we had [00:03:00] made significant progress. And the outcome of that is what you described 13% year-over-year growth in a flat market. 

Ken: And that's absolutely amazing because if the market's not growing, as you mentioned. Now you've got to take it away from somebody else and that's hard to do.

And so how can an organization judge if they are in alignment or not?

Art:  Well, that's what you've got to go measure it. It's  like as Deming said, " You can't manage it if you can't measure it." So part of the exercises is to measure that. And in the book, The Art of Alignment, we specifically talk about the nine pillars of measurement. This is to take the time to find out specifically where the areas of occlusion are, where the opportunities lie, where misalignment may be prevalent, but also where alignment exists.

 So that we can continue to, you know, bolster that, that piece of work that's going on, share it more liberally throughout the organization so that we can all learn from those best practices. Which by the way, is one of those pillars of organizational alignment.

Ken:  Okay. So [00:04:00] you worked for many years with many different kinds of organizations. What is one thing that unaligned organizations have in common? 

Art is a management consultant and shares what he has learned during the management consulting process.