A little bit of alignment of goals can create great results, emergently.
If you don't have alignment of a team then even if everyone's working hard the effort nets out to little movement.
Ideally you want not forced alignment but effortless alignment.
One way is to curate the set of people who already align with where you're going.
It's much harder to compel someone to believe.
"Leave it a little better than you found it" can lead to emergently great results without much coordination.
For it to work, the population needs to have a somewhat consistent understanding of what direction is "better".
But if there's an obvious, agreed upon "better" direction, then each touch makes it better, and that betterness can accumulate and accrete.
The result is difficult to predict, but likely to be great.
If a company's mission is consistently followed in every interaction, then great things can emerge, coherently.
It used to be a pain to think through it for each decision.
But now with LLMs and their infinite patience, it's easier to have a fuzzy set of values and mission statement operationalized.
Every decision can be run through an LLM and flag if it doesn't align with the mission.
Another example: "minimize nasty surprises" is the gradient of improvement for a product.
This is a natural, emergent gradient to make a product better.
The existence of this gradient is why a swarm of people working on P2s can make a product radically better.