Five leaders, five answers: what drift sounds like

Ask five leaders in your company to write, separately, what your customers really buy from you. Don't let them talk first. Then compare.

You'll usually get five different answers. The founder says vision. Sales says price. Support says reliability. Product says a feature. Marketing says the tagline.

That isn't a failure. It's information. Every person sees a different slice of the customer, and every slice is partly true. The trouble starts when each of them makes decisions based on their own slice without knowing the others exist.

In our workbooks, this is Step 2. Everyone answers the same questions independently. If they use different words but mean the same thing, that counts as agreement. Where they genuinely differ, nobody votes on the right answer. The disagreement goes to Step 3, where customer behavior settles it.

Alignment you discover is worth far more than alignment you announce.