Objectives and Key Results

He accepted the assignment and found himself eagerly awaiting the strategy document that was to be supplied by the company's CEO. When it arrived, Ben felt overwhelmed. The strategy slide decks and documents were stuffed with ideas and good intentions, but the materials contained a confusing mix of key pillars or corporate priorities, core values and business metrics. Ben struggled with how to approach the project, and it wasn't until arriving at his hotel room the night before meeting with the CEO and CFO that he recalled the advice of Jeff Walker. With that in mind, Ben condensed the strategy document into a single page, translating the key pillars into objectives and assigning key results to each. The next day, he used this organizing framework of OKRs to share his understanding of the organization's strategy. After his overview, the executives fell quiet and asked for a moment of privacy. Ben left the room convinced he had misinterpreted the strategy and would quickly be dispatched to the airport for the next plane home. Two minutes in the hallway felt like two hours, but when he was summoned back into the room, he was relieved to see a smile on the face of the CEO, who said, We want you to help us create this type of document for every business unit and department in the company. After helping close to 50 teams at the company draft and refine their OKRs, and later witnessing their success with the method, Ben knew he had found his calling. Hundreds of hours of coaching teams and managers later, here we are. Paul Paul has been working in the performance measurement and strategy execution space for close to two decades. He was introduced to the concepts through interactions with a company looking to improve its performance. In Paul's case, the company was in a fast-changing industry with nimble competitors emerging rapidly and customers demanding improved service with no price increases. A new strategy was created, one that, if effectively implemented, would deliver enhanced strategic skill sets across the company, see the overhaul of key business procedures, drive value for customers, and ultimately produce breakthrough financial results. But could they make it happen? Key to their execution was the identification of measures they would use to hold themselves accountable for achieving each plank of the strategy. It took time, but by focusing on a core set of metrics to learn about what was and was not working with the strategy, the company ultimately delivered on its promises to customers, employees, and shareholders alike. The real ah-ha for Paul came in the form of employee surveys conducted before and after the development and use of strategic measurement. Beforehand, just a small percentage of employees said they understood the company's strategy and how they could contribute. However, after the use of strategic measurement, the percentage jumped nearly five-fold to a large majority of employees. Like Ben, Paul saw the value of applying measurement to strategy and set out to help organizations harness that power. Some may be familiar with Paul through his work and books on the Balanced Scorecard, a popular framework that translates strategy into objectives, measures, targets, and strategic initiatives using four distinct yet related perspectives of performance – financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth. The framework has been embraced by legions of organizations around the globe, and while it is unquestionably effective, many companies have struggled in implementing and fully maximizing the benefits of the scorecard model. One of the chief issues organizations raise is the model's increasing complexity. The scorecard's taxonomy has swollen over the years since its founding in the early 1990s, and many experts have layered on increasingly convoluted schematics that have added even more moving parts to what was originally conceived as an easy-to-apply approach to measurement.