What Leaders Get Wrong About Strategic Alignment – Executive Summary
HBR, by Jonathan Trevor, published January 2026
1. Summary
"What Leaders Get Wrong About Strategic Alignment" (HBR, 2026) argues that most organizations fail at alignment not because they lack ambition, but because they misunderstand what alignment requires. First, misalignment is widespread and persistent, even though nearly every executive claims to value alignment, which suggests the problem lies deeper than intent. Second, alignment is not a project with an end date but a continuous, collective leadership discipline that must be maintained as conditions shift. Third, real alignment depends on treating the company as a connected value chain, where purpose, strategy, and architecture stay in sync rather than being managed as separate workstreams. The underlying message is that alignment fails when leaders chase a one-time fix instead of building the ongoing coordination that keeps a business coherent.
2. Relevance for CIOs
CIOs sit at a natural bridge point between disconnected departments and can use integrated data and platforms to close the gaps that create misalignment in the first place. This makes IT strategy inseparable from business strategy: a roadmap that runs parallel to the company's core purpose, rather than fueling it directly, becomes a source of drift rather than a fix for it. CIOs also carry direct ownership of the "Management Systems" link in the value chain, since technology architecture either reinforces business strategy or actively undermines it. When the stack and the strategy fall out of step, the rest of the chain breaks down with it, making architecture ownership a leadership responsibility, not just a technical one.
3. Thoughts from Sonny Claussen (CEO Bee360) about this Article
This connects to Sonny's own experience and his personal takeaway from George Westerman's talk at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in May 2025: durable value comes from disciplined, continuous alignment rather than treating alignment as a project you finish once. It reinforces his broader point that federated organizations, where Data, AI, Cyber, and Cloud each have autonomous leaders, need strategic coherence more than ever, and that coherence is built brick-by-brick, not through a single transformational push.