Alignment Is Not an Instruction

The Global Signal

Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first working digital camera prototype inside Kodak's own labs in 1975, more than a decade before digital photography became a mainstream consumer category. Kodak's leadership was not unaware of digital technology's trajectory; the company held key digital imaging patents and its own executives publicly discussed the shift toward digital photography through the 1980s and 1990s. Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2012, a fact of public record documented in its own bankruptcy filing and widely covered contemporaneously by business press including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The gap was not awareness. Kodak's leadership repeatedly agreed, across decades, that digital was the future. What never received an equivalent instruction was the operating model underneath that agreement: a business built around film manufacturing, chemical processing, and a vast retail print-developing network, whose incentives, staffing, and capital allocation continued rewarding the film business long after leadership had said, out loud and in public, that digital was coming.

The Hidden Signal

A strategy conversation can produce genuine, sincere agreement among leaders in a room without producing any instruction that reaches the systems actually governing frontline work, because agreement and instruction are executed through entirely different channels. Consider a hypothetical scenario, smaller than Kodak's case but illustrative of the same mechanism: a retailer's executive team agrees unanimously in a quarterly review that customer service response time matters more than call volume handled. Six months later, call center staff are still being scheduled, scored, and promoted based on calls handled per hour, because no one translated the room's agreement into a change to the scheduling system, the scorecard, or the promotion criteria that actually govern the floor. The strategy changed. The operating model did not receive the memo, because no one sent it as an instruction to a specific system with a specific owner.

Why the Visible Metric Misleads

A leadership team's own sense of alignment, we all agreed, everyone nodded, the memo went out, is a poor proxy for whether the operating model has actually changed, because alignment is measured by consensus in a room while operational commitment is measured by whether incentives, staffing, and approvals downstream were specifically instructed to change. Kodak's leadership could accurately report high internal alignment on digital's importance for years while the operating model kept its film-era incentives fully intact, because no one had converted the alignment into a specific instruction to a specific system, only into more discussion of the same alignment.

Implication for Operators

Any organization that treats a leadership team's alignment on strategy as evidence that the strategy has been executed should assume the operating model has received no instruction until a specific system, incentive, or approval chain can be named as having actually changed. The practical shift is closing every strategy meeting with a named system and a named owner for the instruction, not a summary of what leadership agreed.