How "Competent Misalignment" Kills Enterprise Value

Most plans don’t fail because the thesis is wrong—every thesis has flaws. They fail because the organization never fully aligns to execute against it and to offset those flaws with deliberate choices, resourcing, and cadence.

Alignment is what turns imperfect strategy into compounding results. We don’t lose value in private equity because people lack effort. We lose it because smart teams do sensible things that don’t add up to the outcome investors actually bought. That’s not incompetence; it’s competent misalignment—work that’s locally optimal and enterprise-suboptimal.

The average plan captures only ~63% of intended value; compounded over three years, that delivers roughly 25% of what you aimed for—leaving about 75% on the table.

How is a company misaligned?

Plan → Operating Choices (and trade-offs)

• Where it goes wrong: The plan is widely understood but never distilled into a short, explicit list of operating choices and “do/don’t” rules. Prior projects keep momentum, so the old agenda survives under new language.

• Typical signals: Long strategy decks; short, vague task lists. Teams claim the same priorities but sequence work differently. Budgets and headcount spread thinly across many initiatives. “Pilot creep” replaces true prioritization.

• Consequences: Diluted effort, slow time-to-impact, and no visible proof that capital and talent actually moved toward the stated bet.

Go-to-Market

• Where it goes wrong: Target segments, sales motions, role boundaries, and pricing/discount rules aren’t crisp or resourced. Sales, marketing, and CS run local plays optimized for their own metrics.

• Typical signals: Conflicting ICP definitions; fuzzy marketing→sales→CS handoffs; uneven enablement. Discounting varies by rep; deal desks bypassed. Pipeline volume rises while win rates and unit economics stagnate.

• Consequences: Revenue volatility, margin leakage, and misleading pipeline optics that obscure forecast risk.

Management Basics

• Where it goes wrong: Decision rights are ambiguous; meetings surface problems but don’t assign owners or deadlines. Side conversations and coalitions re-open decisions

• .Typical signals: Re-litigation of choices; shadow committees; “I thought they owned it.” Leaders hear about issues late; cross-team escalations spike.

• Consequences: Decision latency, frayed relationships, and low confidence that commitments will stick.

Processes

• Where it goes wrong: Core systems aren’t integrated; processes crack under higher volume; risk and compliance controls are ad hoc or manual.

• Typical signals: Duplicate records; manual reconciliations; spreadsheet “bridges” between systems. Prolonged period-end close; audit fire drills. Ops teams maintain side ledgers to keep daily work moving.

• Consequences: Higher error rates, slower reporting cycles, and hidden operational debt that absorbs capacity.

This is a portion of the framework and insights, but you get the idea...

Conclusion

Alignment is the force multiplier. Plans don’t miss because the thesis is imperfect—they miss because choices, resources, cadence, and accountability aren’t wired to the same north star. Left unchecked, “competent misalignment” compounds into the 63% trap—three years later you’ve realized ~25% of the value you bought. The fix isn’t more activity; it’s coherence. Translate the plan into a few explicit operating choices, make trade-offs visible, run a decision-driven rhythm, and insist that product, GTM, systems, data, and talent all say the same thing. When the plan, the calendar, the metrics, and the people align, execution compounds—and the math finally works in your favor.

Sync-Align Can Help: Helps you unlock clarity, confidence, and momentum with a fast, actionable alignment process that’s easy to implement and built for busy leadership teams. You’ll get a data-driven assessment of organizational health, anonymous and unbiased viewpoints, and qualitative findings translated into next steps—so leaders gain perspective and the organization moves in sync. Learn more here