Lead, Align, and Build what matters with Radhika Dutt, Author of Escaping the Performance Trap

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Radhika Dutt, author of the upcoming book Escaping the Performance Trap. Radhika and I talk about the challenges with traditional OKR systems and how companies can break free from the performance theater to create a better way to lead, align, and build what matters. Let's get started.

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Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Radhika Dutt. She's the author of a new book called Escaping the Performance Trap. Welcome. 

Radhika Dutt: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here again. We talked a few years ago. 

[00:00:58] Brian Ardinger: I should say welcome back. Yes, the last time you were on, I think it was episode 273. And you had your first book that came out, which was Radical Product Thinking. And when you said you're writing a new book, and it focused on things like OKRs and goals and how people are misusing that. I said, hey, we need to get her back on to talk about some of the things that she's seeing. So welcome back to the show. Let's get started refreshing the audience a little bit about your background and, and how you got here. 

[00:01:24] Radhika Dutt: Yeah, my background is I started as an engineer. I did my undergrad and grad at MIT. I started companies and I later went to work at bigger companies and it, it was in so many different industries from broadcast media and entertainment, advertising, robotics, even wine. Oh, and telecom was in there too. Government agencies. It was all over.

And so, the one common theme in working across all of these industries, working all of these, at different sizes of companies, the one common theme was I kept seeing the same set of product diseases over and over, and I was learning hard lessons in terms of how do you build good products and avoid these product diseases?

And so that's what led me to write the first book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. And It's been fantastic, like so many people have read it. It's become the staple when people are building products. And what's most satisfying for me is that really a lot of people describe it as it has changed their mindset, that now they apply product thinking to all sorts of things, even to parenting, to personal life, et cetera.

So that's been wonderful to see. Right. But that it's a philosophy of how do you think systematically about products being vision-driven as opposed to iteration led, and let's just throw things at the wall and see what sticks and keep iterating. It was this vision-driven approach. How do you envision, what is the problem you're trying to solve? The end state you wanna create. And how do you systematically drive that change?

So, what brings me to the second book? A lot of people who wrote to me saying, you know, just how helpful Radical Product Thinking was, there was also a set of people who wrote saying, you know, I love what you're saying in Radical Product Thinking, but what do I do in my organization that sets all these goals and OKRs and I have all these short term deliverables and that's what I have to focus on.

I can't do all of this long-term vision driven stuff. And this question came up to me so many times, I realized we really do need to tackle it. And for a long time, by the way, I was seeing the downsides of goals and OKRs, but for so many years I just didn't know how to articulate for people, why should you stop using goals and OKRs?

What's the, what's the problem with them? But most importantly, even if I could say, look, don't use OKRs, the question was always, well. It's the devil I know. What are you proposing instead? You know, I didn't have an answer until I started trying this new approach and it's worked so well and that's what's driving me to write this new book, Escaping the Performance Trap.

[00:04:03] Brian Ardinger: What is a performance trap? What are you seeing and how does that show up in organizations and teams? 

[00:04:09] Radhika Dutt: You know, whenever I talk about the problem with goals and OKRs, people instantly identify one thing, which is we've all been in these monthly cycles where every month for our monthly business review, oh, what are some numbers we can show so that we can show, look, we are achieving these results, things are going well.

What actually happens, right? Is for leaders, you think, oh, I'm seeing these numbers. My team is being rigorous in terms of metrics. You wanna see the numbers, you want to see rigor, you want to see progress. But what you're seeing is an illusion, because what happens is teams are showing you numbers to say, Tada, look, I achieved whatever you wanted.

What is actually happening in ways that you can't see is whenever there are bad metrics, the incentive is to sweep that under the rug. To not show you the bad metrics. And the reality is you learn more from these bad metrics, quote unquote, because those are the numbers telling you what's not working, what you actually need to do to course correct.

So as a leader, you don't always get the clear view. And one example I'll give is I was working at Avid. Where every movie in Hollywood that won an Oscar was made using AVID's video editors. Such a fantastic number, right? Like every, hundred percent of all Oscar winners, et cetera, used avid. It turned out that our market was getting commoditized. That competitors like Apple and Adobe were entering the low end and even encroaching the middle end.

And so, for us, we kept going further up into the high-end niche, and that's where we were really focusing to be able to make our targets. If you looked at the targets and numbers, everything was looking great, and it just seemed like all we had to do was keep focusing on just whatever we were doing. We were going to hit the numbers, right?

And this is what I see often. This approach works until it doesn't work. What you want in the team is not the incentive to show you what's working, but rather have those open discussions to learn, experiment, et cetera. 

[00:06:20] Brian Ardinger: That's a great point and, and I see this a lot in corporate innovation types of teams. They set OKRs at the beginning of the year and you know, especially in innovation where you don't necessarily know what you're building or why you're building it, and things pivot, and change based on what goes on during the year. Oftentimes they don't go back and reevaluate, you know, what are these metrics that we're looking at and are these the right things to measure?

And, and so I see a conflict a lot of times, especially in innovation where, again, it's not necessarily a here's the business model. We know how to exactly execute it and it's more systematic and, and certain. But when you're dealing with new product development or innovation areas where there's naturally more uncertainty, having and picking at the beginning of the year, here's the one thing that we're going to look at. It almost puts you in a bind from day one.