Morning Brief And The Premise

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Good morning. Here's the Time and Energy morning brief for Tuesday, September 29th, 2026. Five intentional minutes before the world starts asking things of

How Organizations Lose Energy

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us. Organizations don't only lose energy when people are exhausted. They lose energy when good people spend it in different directions. And there's a question underneath that idea that I think is worth exploring. How would we know?

Metrics Explain What Not Why

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Most organizations know their numbers. They know revenue, pipeline, margin, retention, customer satisfaction, productivity. Those numbers matter. They tell us a lot about what's happening, but they don't always tell us why it's happening. An organization can be growing while sales and marketing have completely different ideas about what a good opportunity looks like. Sales can be hitting its number while operations is quietly absorbing promises that are increasingly difficult to deliver. Customer satisfaction can look pretty good while different parts of the organization would give you completely different answers about why customers choose you in the first place. Those aren't necessarily performance problems yet, but they might be early signs of an alignment problem, and that's become a pretty important distinction in some of the work we're doing through time and energy.

When Misalignment Becomes A Revenue Risk

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Revenue problems often begin long before a buyer ever speaks with sales. They can begin when different parts of an organization develop different understandings of how the company actually creates value. That's why I've been building something called the Revenue Alignment Diagnostic. The idea behind it is pretty simple. Before we try to improve revenue performance, let's understand whether the organization actually shares an understanding of how revenue gets created.

Three Questions That Reveal Alignment

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Here's a really simple version you can try without taking any diagnostic. Imagine I walked into your organization today and separately asked your CEO, someone in sales, someone in marketing, and someone responsible for serving your customers three questions. Who is our ideal customer? What problem do we solve particularly well for that customer? Why do customers ultimately choose us? How similar would the answers be? That's interesting to me, because everybody could be smart, everybody could be working hard, everybody could care deeply about the customer, and they could still be operating from different versions of the truth. That's where alignment starts to matter. Shared understanding doesn't require everybody to have the same job or see the business exactly the same way. It means we understand how our different roles contribute to the value ultimately experienced by the buyer. Because buyers don't experience our departments, they experience our organization. And if we're sending different signals internally, eventually there's a pretty good chance the customer experiences some of that externally.

Shared Understanding Beats Revenue Targets

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So here's something to think about today. Don't ask whether everyone in your organization knows the revenue goal. Ask whether they share an understanding of how you're going to create it. Those are very different questions. And if you're not sure how your organization would answer, that's exactly why I built the revenue alignment diagnostic. It takes about five minutes, and I'll include a link with today's brief if you'd like to give it a try. No pitch required. You might simply learn something about where your organization is aligned, where it isn't, and where some of its energy may be getting lost between the two. Sustainable revenue begins with making sure we're working from a shared understanding of how we create value.

Try The Diagnostic And Wrap

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Thanks for following along, and if you'd like to discuss your results of the diagnostic, let me know. Make it a great day.