Here is an excerpt from an article written by Nilofer Merchant for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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“If [fill in the person] thinks I’ve bought in, they’re crazy.”

“Even if [fill in the group] doesn’t believe in our current vision, they’ll believe when they see it.”

“I don’t think [fill in the project] even matters to our customers.”

These are not the kinds of comments any of us utter if we know “the boss” could hear them. But each of us can likely remember a time in our career where we said it, or heard it. It’s tempting to think that people who aren’t on board will eventually “self-select out of the organization” or, if you’re the boss, you’ll never have to be that hard-ass who says, “Sorry, but this is just how it is.”

Most of us generally avoid conflict. After all, who can remember getting a performance review saying, “You rock at conflict!” Instead, we reward getting along, and being good corporate citizens, and we hope that disagreements will resolve themselves. But as we’ve all learned in real life, hope is not a strategy. Because most of us are bad at dealing with conflict, we’re also bad at fostering what must, in a successful business, come through conflict — whether overt or covert. And that’s alignment.

Alignment is among the contenders for the most overused word in business today. Why is that? It’s not very sexy. Out of curiosity, I ran it through a search engine and what did I get? Wait for it… wheel alignment.

Ooh, yeah. Sexy.

But wheel alignment is actually an apt metaphor for organizational alignment. In a nutshell, wheel alignment is a matter of adjusting the angles of the wheels so that they are perpendicular to the ground and parallel to each other. The purpose of these adjustments is maximum tire life and a vehicle that tracks true when driving along a straight and level road. When a car is out of alignment, we get rapid tire wear, or a vehicle that pulls away from a straight line. The driver wastes time and resources fighting to keep the car on course. A shock to the system — hitting a pothole, say — can throw a car that’s well-aligned out of alignment.

The parallels to business are likely obvious to you, but let’s just complete the picture: Between the creation of a new idea and that idea becoming a new market reality, many different decisions and actions need to happen. The degree to which those designs, choices, tradeoffs, etc, are more in sync, the faster and easier that new reality comes into play. The more people disagree or are confused, the less “aligned” the mechanisms are to create the desired result. The more we disagree while trying to execute, the more wear and tear on the people, and the unnecessary expenses (of time, of resources) we incur. The more we move forward without real agreement, the more we veer all over the road.

Alignment matters because it decreases the amount of energy it takes to go from A to Z. If your company is less aligned than, say, a competitor, they might reach the market faster, or spend less, or simply get more deals done and lock you out of the picture. While you may still get from A to C or even to K with some misalignment, you are living with friction and energy loss. It’s when alignment kicks in that the enterprise really scales. Alignment is always behind a winning market situation.

There are three areas where alignment is pivotal:

[Here’s the first. To read the complete article, please click here]

The alignment of the brand’s promise with the market’s needs. As Seth Godin says: Long-term brands and relationships are built on alignment. The Wal-Mart relationship: I want the lowest prices and Wal-Mart is committed to giving me the lowest prices. That’s why there’s little pushback about customer service or employee respect… the goals are aligned. The Apple relationship: I want Apple to be cool. Apple wants to be cool. That’s why there’s little pushback on pricing, obsolescence, or disappointing developers.

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What your brand promise is, how much money you want to earn, who your key customers are — these are thorny questions. No wonder alignment is so hard.

In business, disagreement is fine as long as you come to clarity on which path is the one you will travel together. At that point, it becomes an energy drain. Sooner or later, you’ll face one of those In or Out moments, as in: Are you in, or are you out? The object lesson is this: No. We cannot agree to disagree.

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Nilofer Merchant is a corporate advisor and speaker on innovation methods. In her book, The New How, The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy, she discusses collaborative ways to have your whole company strategize, was published in 2010. Follow her on Twitter @nilofer.