
CHA PTER 5: Alignment for Growth56
against this. They lacked the language, the symbolic thinking, and the
constant innovation.
THE POWER OF A COMMON LANGUAGE
Just as a common language gave early humans a powerful competitive
advantage over Neanderthals, it can also give a country or an organiza-
tion a powerful competitive advantage. As we have seen, a language
does four important things:
1. It helps to achieve alignment.
2. It changes how people think.
3. It permits many complex issues to be simplied and expressed in
symbolic terms.
4. It allows local innovations to be more rapidly communicated
across small groups, thereby facilitating ...