Aligning CS with business goals

In theory, all projects that are conducted within a business should align with the overarching business strategy. Alignment is how a company ensures that the work being performed by employees is in service to the strategy. And while it might seem abstract to employees, good leaders will be able to describe to their teams how everything they do supports the corporate strategy. It was way back in 1997 that the late, great Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, talked about corporate strategy (https://hbr.org/1997/11/making-strategy-learning-by-doing):

The strategy must mirror the realities of the company’s environment, and the resource allocation process must mirror the strategy.

Getting that mirroring right is a tricky thing. Companies that find themselves out of alignment with this mirroring can very quickly stumble and lose customers and even succumb to competitive threats because they might be perceived as being inconsistent...