The Starting Point: Aligning Around Trends

Gaps between the ways individual members of an SMT view the world can be dramatic. But what is truly astonishing is not that they disagree; it's that they often don't even know that they disagree. Why? In many cases it's because they've never discussed it.

Some years ago I was working with a large, non-U.S. carpet manufacturer. The primary determinant of demand in the carpet industry is construction of new homes. At the time, new home construction in the company's domestic market was in a trough—that much everyone agreed on. But the head of Sales and the head of Operations disagreed on just about everything else. It seemed that whenever a large capital project was discussed, they were consistently on opposite sides of the issue.