In the Daily Universe editorials page, there was a political cartoon which showed a stage coach being pulled one direction by an elephant and the opposite direction by a donkey. The passengers were looking towards the person reading the comic with dumbfounded looks. This comic immediately made me think of the 7S analysis we performed on HP.
The US is a beautiful country with so many grand ideals that went into its formations. One of the major changes from colonial rule was a true implementation of checks and balances. Having an executive branch, legislative branch, and judicial branch keep all power from residing in a defacto monarch/tyrant. The downfall is that there is no one way to set a strategy for the country. Part of the way the country has attempted to work around this limit was to render the country to a 2 part system where there is a chance that you can have people who all lean one direction to be in power at the same time and allow the coach to be pulled in one direction.
The upside with HP, was that they are able to have a defacto tyrant (still responsible to the board/shareholders, but given alot of free reign). Despite the size, there is no check or balance to day to day execution of strategy, what the CEO says should occur (within constraint of the corporate regulations and laws of the land). I have seen Obama going head to head with the Republican leaders in the house and a stalemate occuring, there should not be such an occassion at HP, yet we saw Fiorina in such a position with her board when it came to the merger with Compaq. Despite the aforementioned, Fiorina had the capability to get everyone moving in the same direction through reorganization, new hires and a specific corporate vision. Unfortunately, as with certain presidents in the past, the assumed power of their position doesn't excuse them from actually ensuring that what they say actually makes it to the execution.
The US government will probably never be truly aligned, but there shouldn't be a lack of effort from the executive branch to at least try to move in one direction. In the case of a CEO there is no excuse for not trying to get all 7 S's aligned. You are hired and given a mandate, align the business with that mandate and you won't have to fight the board. If you succeed in not contravening your board, you won't have a situation where you are so musy pulling in one direction that you fail to stop another authority from pulling in the opposite direction.
