Marketoonist: "Herding Cats and Strategic Alignment" cartoon

Weekly hand-drawn business cartoon from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne

Author

Tom Fishburne
October 28, 2024

Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

Herding Cats and Strategic Alignment

A few weeks ago, I drew a cartoon about the “silo syndrome” that most organizations struggle to navigate.

It got me thinking about the challenge of strategic alignment in general — how hard it is to get and keep the extended organization on the same page.

A big part of the marketing job is learning to manage by influence — a classic case of “accountability without authority.” Marketing is typically held responsible for results led by other functions in an organization.

Marketing strategy not only needs to dovetail with the overall company strategy, it needs to be communicated in a way that the rest of the organization can understand and act on.

I stumbled across a Harvard Business Review article from professors Vikas Mittal, Alessandro Piazza, and Ashwin Malshe that discovered a large gap between actual and perceived strategic alignment.

In their study, 82% of employees reported that they felt strategic agreement in their companies. But when the researchers probed written explanations from those same employees about what the company strategies actually were, the real alignment was only 23%.

This strategic misalignment can lead to all sorts of issues as companies work to make things happen.

As the CEO of one of the companies in the study concluded:

“Everybody seems to be interpreting strategy based on their functional silos, even members of our strategy team.”

(As an aside, the “herding cats” analogy was famously used in a 2000 Super Bowl ad by EDS, an HP company. But I was surprised to learn that the first known reference to cat herding came from the 1979 Monty Python movie, Life of Brian.)

Keynote speaking

I’m excited to speak at Spotlight by Semrush in Amsterdam this Wednesday, October 30, alongside incredible speakers like Jon Evans from System1 and Zaria Parvez from Duolingo. I hope to see some of you there.

Here are a few other upcoming events.

Please let me know if you’d ever like to talk about bringing levity to any events you’re planning. And please recommend me to friends or colleagues.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a Halloween one one from 2017 (one of my favorites).

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.