On the foundations of strategic alignment

The notion of strategic alignment has assumed considerable importance in the discourse on business strategy. A critical gap in the literature on strategic alignment is the absence of crisp, actionable definitions of alignment. This paper seeks to address this gap in three ways. First, we provide a conceptual tool-kit that can be used to describe strategies in a domain-independent fashion. Second, we define conditions that can be used to evaluate two alternative notions of alignment: basic alignment and full-alignment. Third, we show that these two notions define the end points of a spectrum of varying degrees of alignment, with the conditions defined in our framework providing a rich vocabulary for describing alternative intuitions on alignment.