Business 2.0 talks to Google CEO Eric Schmidt about goal alignment (even if they don’t use the words). Here’s "the … formula he uses to stay on track while innovating: Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses."
In Schmidt’s words: "the test that I apply — and we do this every day, 70/20/10 — is to ask how a feature will extend the core, the adjacent, or the innovative stuff to fulfill our mission. That’s the sort of drug that we all take, and it works really quite well."
Goal alignment takes many forms. It’s interesting to see how a hot company like Google thinks about keeping it’s employees, and indeed, the entire company, on the right track.