4. Do OKR's work?

In this episode we address the elephant in the room: Do OKRs work? Our special guest is Jenny Herald, Vice President of Product Evangelism at Quantive which delivers better business outcomes for companies providing a strategy execution platform based on the OKR methodology.

In this episode we get her experiences on the following questions: 

• What are we doing wrong and how can we do it better? (we sneakily asked this twice!) 
• If you have a good strategy, a series of solid plans and well understood KPI’s, what is the incremental value of OKRs? 
• How do you avoid the conflation of business as usual KPI’s and change with OKRs when a lot of organisations simply transpose their ARR target as the topline OKR.  
• If OKRs are simply a framework to help you do the right stuff, why not use any number of other goal frameworks? 
• Should OKRs involve all functions in the organisation? Should OKRs be cascaded down to every level?  
• We’ve all read Measure What Matters and Radical Focus and are still rolling it out wrong. If you want to make it work in practice, where do you start? 
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Speaker notes and references:

• OKR Program Failure Prevention Guide
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• IBM’s CEO expects A.I. to be so good at back office work that he plans to pause hiring humans for those jobs
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• What is the Modern Operating Model?
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• The Global State of OKRs Trends Report 2023
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• OKR vs KPIs, What is the Difference?
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• AMA with Christina Wodtke: Encouraging Autonomy and Writing Awesome OKRs
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• Felipe Castro: The Intersection of OKRs and Agile
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• Use OKRs to Set Goals for Teams, Not Individuals
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• The difficulties of cascading OKRs
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• OKRs Field Book Preview: 10 Universal Parameters
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As Vice President of product evangelism, Jenny Herald champions Quantive's vision and shares how customers achieve better business outcomes with the world's most powerful Strategy Execution Platform based on the OKR methodology. Jenny also hosts the Dreams with Deadlines podcast where she interviews business leaders on aligning teams and organisations around a common purpose, the ups-and-downs of goal management, strategy execution, and everything in between.

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