There is an ongoing debate about "alignment" in business units ranging from marketing to IT, the crux of the debate being about whether the activities of that business unit "align" with the overall activities and strategy of the company as a whole. Like many things in life, if you are spending a significant amount of time wondering about alignment you likely do not have it.
 
Alignment should be natural and effortless when it happens, and alignment can be promoted starting with three steps:
 
1) Stop fixing yesterday's problems. Too many business units spend irreplaceable resources on fixing past problems, then wonder why they have no time to lay the foundation for their future direction. While operational problems are bound to arise, and even the most effective company has the occasional hiccup, those closest to the problem should be empowered to fix it. Build mitigation plans that do not require all hands drop what they are doing and fight today's fire, and allow your best people to focus on tomorrow's challenges. Just as a machine shop requires downtime to retool for a different product, your people require time to retool as well, time that might be better spent on more forward-thinking tasks.

2) Look at the company's bottom line. Often, accounting gimmicks and complex financial structures compensate people for generating a dollar for their profit center when a different approach might have generated five dollars for the company as a whole. People naturally do what they are compensated for, and if you compensation structures promote protecting and advancing fiefdoms and self-interests or spending months to "save" pennies, you will find yourself debating "alignment" while profit passes out the door.

3) Realize who your customer is. Support organizations like IT are notorious for talking about "the customer" when referring to colleagues in another business units. This attitude is counterproductive, and makes you subservient to internal interests rather than those of your true customer: the entity signing checks for your goods or services. This concept might cause an organization to rethink monolithic "shared services" functions or reporting structures for the better. Since corporate strategy rarely lives and dies on internal business units, shifting your focus to the true customer naturally aligns your business unit with the core components of any strategy: markets, products and resources.

I have seen a disturbing trend whereby individuals or groups of people confuse problems with opportunities. From individuals influenced by a passing fad to refer to everything from a stubbed toe to a tax penalty as an "opportunity," to entire businesses that allocates their best and brightest towards dealing with problems, rather than focusing on true opportunity.
 
While this may sound like a game of semantics, the difference between a problem and an opportunity is quite evident: one deals with the past and is reactionary, while the other focuses on future results. Whether a problem comes in the guise of "fire fighting" a distracting problem where everything must be dropped, or a cerebral challenge that is intellectually stimulating and gratifying, dealing with problems is patching a hole in a past solution, rather than building a ship to embark on a future journey.
 
No one can completely avoid problem solving, but learning to distinguish problems from legitimate opportunities allows you to shift your personal and organizational attention span away from the past, and bring the heavy artillery onto those areas that prepare you for the future.

Perhaps it is a bit unfair to poke fun at another country's efforts to translate signage into English, especially from a complex language like Mandarin Chinese, a language of which I can barely master a few words. That said, I've come to enjoy the "interesting" English translations that abound in China and I am hopeful that the Chinese get a good laugh out of whatever strange translations we have placed in Chinatowns in non-Mandarin speaking countries around the world. Some of my favorites are the "Yuppie Building" in Beijing, and the sign that advised that "Drunkards and insane people are prohibited" on the cable car up the Great Wall. These of course are humorous examples, while an imposing billboard near my hotel provides the inspiring and somewhat cryptic suggestion that "Time is money, efficiency is life" in block letters under a series of bold Chinese characters.
 
Some translations strike a delicate balance between incomprehensibility and the poetic. A sign outside a nightclub showed icon of a pair of shoes, helpful suggesting that I "Always wear trimly," just above a picture of a handgun and knife with a red "X" and the admonishment that one "Not schlep weapons." In an interesting spin on the green movement, the Xian airport had a bin for "Recyclable" material placed next to a bin marked "Un-recycle." Perhaps my favorite was found in a menu in a market in Shenzhen. Below what appeared to be a rather tasty dish was the somewhat less appealing English translation: "Fried Ass Meat."