OKRs Explained: How to Turn Strategy into Action with Evan Campbell | CFO 4.0 Podcast 292

0:00Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance. The CFO role is changing rapidly, moving from cost controller to strategic visionary. And with every change comes opportunity. We are here to help you take advantage of this transition to win at work, drive your career forwards and lead with confidence. Join Hannah Munro, Managing Director of ITAS, a financial transformation consultancy, as she interviews key experts to give you real-world advice and guidance on how to transform your processes, people and data. Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of CFO 4.0.

0:49As usual, I'm your host, Hannah Munro, and with me today is a returning guest, Evan Campbell. Now, I so enjoyed my last podcast with Evan, who is, by the way, the author of Adapt to Win, for those of you that don't remember. I invited him back on and we're going to talk about, I guess, the next layer of strategy or one of the essential steel ribbons, as he described it, which is OKRs. So Evan, let's just talk a little bit about what is an OKR? Why do we need it? And how is it different from all the other things that we have within a business to measure? That's probably like five questions wrapped up into one.

1:28So you've decided where you want to start. But they're all good ones. And thanks, Hannah. It's great to be back with you. I enjoyed our last session so much. And I think the sequence that we're doing it is great. The last session, we really talked about the high-level objective, which is for organizations to develop the competencies to consistently and eventually adaptively realize their strategic objectives. And we know from industry statistics that organizations are doing a terrible job of it, broadly. 70 % of strategic initiatives in public corporations fail. A very high percentage, approximately equal percentage of companies fail to achieve their strategic objectives altogether.

2:18So we've got this desire, which we talked about in the last session, to realize our mission, our vision, our winning aspiration as a company. One of the most important levers to doing that is ensuring that the investments we make as an organization and the work that's being performed day to day by our employees are well aligned to the strategic objectives that the leadership is set, the leadership intent. So, you know, the subtitle of the book, as you recall, is a framework to overcome strategy decay using OKRs and lean portfolio management. Well, as you said, the OKR framework is the strategy realization framework that I've selected in the book to ensure that we have this steel thread that goes from the top level global corporate long-term strategic goals all the way down to the day-to-day decisions that everybody in the organization is making.

3:28So what are OKRs? Objectives and key results. It is one of a dozen or more frameworks that set goals and measures. MBOs set management by objective. This old framework was a goal and some measures. I've used V2Mom, which was popularized at Salesforce. OGSM, which came out of Procter & Gamble. Hoshin Connery, which came out of Lean. These all have goals. Some of them have a bunch of other stuff, which I think is actually more of a detriment than a help. In In other words, V2MOM, OGSM, they're conflating some tactics with strategy. And I think it actually gets really confusing. So part of the beauty of OKRs is they're really simple.

4:20There's a goal and there's some measures. If you achieve the measure, the goal is accomplished by definition. But what's different? You know, MBOs were really prominent in corporate America, at least, you know, a decade or two ago, and they failed miserably. Everybody, with any sense at all, learned immediately to sandbag the objective so that you're setting an unambitious, easy to achieve goal and game the numbers so that you get your bonus. Well, the other thing that was bad about MBOs is it was a very much a top-down cascade of goals that were deposited from the layer above upon the layer or individual below with very little engagement, typically.

5:19oftentimes because the goals were so derivative so such a mechanistic decomposition as they move down the layers from president to vice president to director to manager they often didn't make a lot of sense and they often weren't very realistic employees did not embrace this model they didn't take a deep level of understanding ownership or accountability for these goals that were deposited upon them. They made sure that they did what they needed to do to get their bonus, gained the numbers, moved on, and did what they were going to do anyway. Why are OKRs so much better when it's just another goal and measurement framework compared to all the others?

6:01The power of OKRs comes from the fact that the employees, the teams, the different parts of the organization are deeply involved in creating the objectives that they're for themselves. They propose them. They don't have autonomy. You know, they will be managerial approval will ultimately occur before they're formalized. But you ask the employee, you know, or the team, think this is the corporate strategy. This is the strategy of the business unit, the product line, the P &L, the department. These are where we're at in terms of our strategic objectives. Given your capabilities, your focus, your passion, what you do in the organization, what can you do best to help advance the strategy of the company to be successful?

6:59And because they're thinking deeply about how they fit into the strategy and how they contribute, they actually understand the strategic objectives of the organization more deeply so they can focus on the right things. And they accept greater accountability for owning the OKR that they themselves created. And that's much of why OKRs work. And I will say that that's a philosophical sort of a process difference in a sense, but mostly philosophical and cultural. You can succeed with any of these goal setting frameworks that I itemized. I mean, these are all strategy frameworks. and you can screw up OKRs if you cascade them from top to bottom and I can in a minute we'll get into more of the do's and don'ts of ways that you can have a successful strategy program or torpedo your strategy program so that it's guaranteed to be unsuccessful and again any of these frameworks can be successful and implemented wrong OKRs can fail miserably.

8:12So it's really important we understand what makes them successful. And how do we get into like how do we approach OKRs, but just kind of going on the difference and keeping on that theme. How does it differ from like the KPI conversations or balanced scorecard, etc.? How does that fit into the model? Or should you have both? Or is that a completely separate piece? Well, I have a different answer for each of the potential other metrics that we might include. So some of these frameworks, MBOs, typically used KPIs as the measurement for the objective, right? Now, the thing, that's very confusing.

9:01Because organizations typically have a lot of KPIs. more often too many of low quality as opposed to having a few that really are key performance indicators, right? So when we're using OKRs for our strategy process, for our strategy framework, I usually advocate also having KPIs, but they have different distinct roles. We use OKRs to manage change to the organization. The key result is saying we're going to increase customer satisfaction from 85 % to 95%. That is a change that we're implementing in the organization to achieve our strategic outcomes. KPIs, on the other hand, are a whole set of instrumentation metrics that exist on different parts of the business.

10:09A KPI should have a control band. And basically, I use the analogy all the time of an instrument panel. I have sort of a tongue in cheek example in the book where I say, ah, you know, we're flying on a plane from, you know, Texas to Durango and we're going to ride a mountain bike race. And we're going along. The pilot has a compass that is his direction, the outcome that he's trying to achieve. The compass says, you know, go northwest. And we're going along merrily. He's got a million little instruments on his dashboard, temperature, oil pressure, fuel levels, a million things. And they're all in the green, so he's ignoring them.

10:59Well, all at once, the starboard engine ingests a goose, and it's on fire. And the temperature gauge is flashing red. And all at once, guess what? That KPI became an OKR because we're not going to make it to Durango if we don't fix the engine, right? So that's the role of a KPI. When a KPI is out of compliance and it's essential to the success of the business achieving its strategy, it gets elevated to be an OKR until it's brought back into compliance. Conversely, an OKR where we're saying we really want to get customer satisfaction from 85 % to 90%, once we've achieved that OKR, it's 90%, and that's good enough for now, it becomes a KPI so that we track it to detect if it goes wonky or goes bad on us.

11:56But it's not something where we're still changing the business. So keep the lights on, business as usual, day-to-day operations or KPIs, changing the business, achieving our strategic objectives and winning continuous improvement are OKRs. And that's an interesting piece if you sort of think of it in that piece. As you want to change something or improve something or focus on something, it becomes an OKR. Like what is the time frame that you should look over? because it might be that your, I don't know, your customer CSAT has dropped a percentage point and you need to get it back up within range.

12:38Would that still be something that you would use as an OKR or would you say actually it's just that's business as usual and actually the bigger focus is something else? Well, so look, what we want from OKRs, we want focus, we want accountability, We want alignment, which is very important. We can talk about that in a minute. I often say that the killer feature of OKRs done right is alignment, horizontal alignment, specifically not the top-down vertical alignment, but horizontal alignment in large traditional organizations. That's a huge issue. But so these people call these the OKR superpowers.

13:23And in order to get them especially focus, you know, we can't have – so we've got a vision, a mission. And then I like to use Roger Martin's ideas of defining where do we play and how do we win. And that's how we define the top-level strategy, North Star. How do we win is what gets translated into the top level OKRs for the organization. So there's certainly going to be one year OKRs at the corporate level. Some businesses, especially if it's a capital intensive business with long planning horizons, say we're building or buying airplanes or tankers or a refinery, we might have OKRs that are three or five years.

14:18At some point, you know, so the OKRs at that level are guiding the entire organization and forcing alignment between all its constituencies. The next layer, business units, product lines, P &Ls, geographies, down to functional departments, value streams, roles. These are all laddering up, not cascading down, but laddering up. That's that philosophical distinction I was talking about. And so if you have too many of these, if you have, you know, oftentimes we'll have strategic themes or strategic pillars and people, we've got five pillars and we've got to have at least three OKRs for everyone. And it's like, no, stop.

15:07You can't, you know, focus is about making decisions about what you're not going to do. So to your question, Hannah, you know, are there things that you might want to improve that don't deserve to be elevated to a strategic OKR for this quarter that the department is really going to pour their energy into? Sure. Those are the tough decisions we make at the strategic level. and when we're drafting OKRs about, you know, is this really the most impactful thing we can do to help us win? Or is this where we need to put all the wood behind the arrow? Because we can't do five OKRs and succeed at all.

15:49So you've mentioned a few numbers. You've mentioned five OKRs, five stupid things and three OKRs for each. What is the perfect number of OKRs? I look at you trying to draw me into something, you know. I'm not going there. So it really is, you know, classic consultant answer. It depends. Five is almost always too many. And, you know, obviously, like, the answer may be different in a large multinational corporation at the top level versus my team and my department, right? And at some point, we're going from annual OKRs to quarterly OKRs. And those time horizons might help us come to a different answer on how many are appropriate.

16:40But I have worked in more organizations that have too many than too few. And I've even worked in a company where we were having a really hard time making progress, executing on our strategic objectives. And the CEO said for the next couple of quarters, the entire company is working on one OKR because we cannot get focus. We are too undisciplined. We're scattered. And the whole company, everybody in the company is going to work on one OKR for a couple of quarters. So really to try to give you a fair answer, you know, I think two or three for most of the teams is. As much as you should probably be trying to tackle in a quarterly horizon, you can always, you know, change them.

17:37if you do a sensational job on a couple of them, you can move something from a different strategic pillar in next quarter, if that becomes the next most impactful thing you can work on. Yeah. So, you know, no more than three really at a time. And, but, you know, you have, like you say, that ability to swap, evaluate them each quarter and go, is this still the right three things that we should be focusing on strategically? And often, so the objective is a more qualitative statement. It should be a goal that is inspiring, ambitious, something that's really challenging. And then the KRs are empirical, they're quantitative.

18:23And usually two to five KRs on an objective is what seems to be good. If by definition, all of the KR, all the measures are met, by definition, that OKR is satisfied. You're 100 % successful with it. What you often see, Hannah, is that an objective will carry on for multiple quarters. As you're making progress or not, the KRs will be dialed up or down to continue to either set the next target, the next objective up the hill or deal with the fact that maybe something in the environment happened that caused you to not be able to achieve that OKR. And you're going to, but you still need to get there, but you're going to adjust the metrics to try to be more realistic given what's going on.

19:17So let's just, let's refine that terminology. So you mentioned objective and key results. What are those and how are they different within the OKR? Well, so the objective is this very ambitious, inspiring statement of what outcome you're trying to achieve. It should be something that feels like a business impact. Our company provides the greatest service experience in the industry. The kind of thing where you could put an exclamation point on it and I'm rallying around that. That sounds awesome. And then the KRs are just the opposite. It's like, well, what are the key levers or what are the components that we think best measure?

20:08So for this customer sat thing, it could be an NPS score. It could be customer retention in the sense of upselling and buying and renewing. All of those things would be reflections that we're achieving that objective. And they have to be numerical. If you find yourself having a bunch of them that are binary, where it's true or false, yes or no, that's bad. It probably means that you're starting to turn your OKRs into tasks, which is an anti-pattern. This is strategy deployment. This is not task deployment. And one of the mistakes I see all the time is the top level strategy gets articulated as strategic objectives.

20:57And then what gets deployed down to the people doing the work is a whole bunch of projects and tasks and do this, do that. And in that translation, you've lost the steel thread of leadership intent, right? The point is that you hired smart employees. You pay them well for their brains, their experience, and ultimately their judgment and decisions that they make on the ground. They're closer to the customer. why don't we tell them big picture what we're trying to accomplish what business outcomes we're trying to get and let them decide the tactics that they're going to use to get there and so you know again don't don't deploy tactics it's really hard on a portfolio manager who's being who's all the guidance he's getting on strategy is do this project the budget says that and he's trying to make a decision about funding one initiative candidate versus another based on strategic impact, it makes an untenable position for that manager.

22:05Okay, so we've kind of figured out what OKRs are. And what's really interesting is it's taken us a few things just to get under the hood of that. And as we've gone through that, you've mentioned some do-nots, right? So what does a good OKR definition processor actually look like? Well, so you should have people and processes established in the organization that will ensure a robust strategy execution process, right? So this is first to use OKRs for strategy deployment, which is where the top level strategy is being decomposed and you're communicating it to everybody in the organization. They're developing their OKRs.

22:53And so you're trying to overcome this strategy decay issue where people get confused about what the strategy is and potentially do the wrong things or invest in the wrong projects. So that's the strategy deployment part. And having an expert facilitator, often the title of that role is an OKR champion. in. And it's not necessarily a full-time job. It can roll up to the chief strategy officer. Often it's a chief of staff role that it rolls up to. We can discuss what the span of control of OKR champions might be, how many teams, et cetera. All of that's dependent, but there needs to be somebody who's doing a few things.

23:38In the strategy deployment phase of the process, They're bringing these teams together. They're ensuring that the strategic context and leadership intent is crystal clear to those teams. And then they're asking these teams to propose objectives and key results that they think would be most impactful to helping the company succeed. They're also asking, they're helping them write better OKRs. They're challenging them whether the objectives are sufficiently ambitious. And they're also asking, this is that alignment thing, what do you need to be true for you to be able to own and be accountable for this OKR, right?

24:24So if you're setting a sales target, sales depends on marketing, right? I can't own a quota bogey if I'm not getting the SQLs for marketing and lead gen. Maybe they need product to provide a big release for the trade show to justify. So this is sort of the chain of dependencies that need to be aligned to ensure that everybody can achieve their objectives or negotiate different KRs that they actually can achieve based on the number of SQLs that marketing's able to commit to. So creating this horizontal alignment across the silos is a really important thing that requires deliberate facilitation time process.

25:14Then you track those. Now we're into strategy execution. Right. One of the really common anti patterns that you get with any goal framework is set it and forget it goals. It's the beginning of the quarter. Oh, let's come up with a bunch of MBOs or OKRs. oh three months later we haven't talked about them once nobody knows how they're doing well you know it's the end of the month or the end of the quarter rather and it seems like we failed on all of them maybe we should talk about this halfway through the quarter you know what happened i don't know let's come up with some next ones for next quarter you know that that happens way too often so strategy execution another essential sub process to it strategy realization is that is where you're okay our champions and the leadership is actually tracking the krs and saying you know are are we on a trajectory to hit the moon or are we going off to outer space lost forever um do we need to intercede and get this team or this group back on track do we has something changed that's so thermonuclear, we may even need to adjust the KRs mid quarter.

26:27So anyway, you got to have people who have some accountability for this process. You have to have the data, the KR, the state or status of the KRs needs to be transparent, accurate, and timely. And so all of these are policy decisions that also need to be in place. So we've defined our objectives and our key results, right? And it's now time to actually speak to the team. And like you say, take that bottom up approach. Like, how does that, how do you best suggest that that works? So the way I did it yesterday with the senior executives of a health system and hospital system here. We reiterated the vision, the mission, where we play, how do we win, what's our winning aspiration as an organization.

27:28We talked about some of the strategic themes that the board of directors had prioritized for the senior leadership. And then we broke into groups and worked on defining, proposing objectives in each of those strategic themes, those areas of strategic themes. And these are things like, you know, growth and financial health, reputation, you know, and brand, employee sat and being a great place to work and attracting the best employees. These are typical themes. And then we did some prioritization. We tried to focus down on which one, which of the proposed objectives seemed to align most strongly with achieving what the board wanted.

28:23And then once we've got, you know, the top candidate objectives, we start to talk about what the key results, what measures we would focus on achieving that would best support the realization of that objective. and and when you're having those discussions with around the objectives and the key results is that done at the sort of c-suite level and then you roll and then that then gets rolled through and around the rest of the team and yeah how does it what so i guess at what point do you bring the the wider team involved like you say get that ownership and accountability let's say well once once those stabilize so we're we're doing kind of a reboot of of a large health system um and so we're we're at the one year top level okrs right now and um the we we need to have those if not finalized at least fairly stable as we go into the different groups and functions of the organization and we ask them to define their OKRs that align up, that ladder up to and support the objectives above them, we need to have those stabilized.

29:45Otherwise, you're just creating what I call an OKR ghetto. And you see organizations, people in organizations who are very well intended. And I see this really frequently in product management, where there's conflict between product management and engineering or something and they're like man i don't really know what our roadmap's supposed to do and you're you know you're confused about what we're trying to achieve let's implement okrs for the product and put it in the roadmap and you know then we'll have better communication between product and engineering the problem is that those things don't have that steel thread the ladder up that validates that they're actually serving the best interest of the company they're kind of inferring what they think the best interest of the company is instead of having that clarity provided to them to ladder up to so so i think what you're saying there is you kind of stabilize and issue those okrs at that sort of senior level sort of see how that goes maybe for for a period of time and we'll talk about that sort of that that landscape in a second And then what you then do is do a similar exercise, but at the different departmental or functional levels.

31:00Yeah, in a large organization, you'd have geographies, P &Ls, business units. Traditional organizations tend to be functionally organized. So you've got these fairly rigid silos, which, you know, this is a huge obstacle to success for organizations achieving strategic initiatives because a strategic initiative requires horizontal collaboration. And, you know, your traditional silos, sales, marketing, ops, finance, HR, you know, if there isn't really clear strategic intent above them, the leaders inevitably, they control goals and rewards in their silos. So they just make up what works best for them and they can be very parochial.

31:48I mean, I've seen a locally optimized procurement and supply chain organization destroy a product company to the point that it was divested because procurement was so locally optimized for what was convenient and financially advantageous for their silo. They completely undermined product development to the point that their products were irrelevant, uncompetitive, and they lost their reputation for being highly innovative and responsive. And the company divested them at a great loss because of this kind of misalignment, this lack of horizontal alignment. It's a good example in the book that I talk about, but that was a client of mine.

32:33It was really sad because they were a great company. And you mentioned sort of the, you know, each level of OKR should stack up to the parent. And one of the topics that we came, the statements we started with is that one of the challenges with the other methods is sandbagging. How do you make sure that, I guess, the connection from the functional departmental level equals, I guess, the stretch of that top level strategic objective? objective? Yeah. So there's two things I want to say to that. The first is you force that horizontal alignment, right? When you've got real clarity through well-written OKRs about what the board wants and what the senior executives say winning looks like, it should be really hard for one silo leader to do something that's undermining the strategy that's articulated above them.

33:34It's when that strategy above them is ambiguous, fuzzy, not articulated, not actionable. I mean, it isn't necessarily malevolent. They may just be making up the best answers they can, or they may just be that parochial and selfish. It could be either way. But when you have that clarity and you're really forcing alignment at each tier to ladder up to the objectives above them, you absolutely set up, you know, that chief product officer can call out that chief procurement officer and say, your goals that you're setting for your teams, the objectives, the OKRs that I see your team coming up with are actively undermining our corporate strategy.

34:26And they have the dashboard, the measure that can say, these OKRs you're coming up with serve, I don't know who they serve, but they don't serve our definition of winning as a company. So you need to get your OKRs in aligned with mine, we need to be horizontally aligned to achieve the objectives above us. So that is a powerful, powerful tool to overcome these parochial silos that are so powerful and locally optimized to the detriment of the larger organization. And this is why 70 % of strategic initiatives in American companies fail, because you don't have alignment. Everybody's doing their own thing.

35:12So another question you alluded to regarding sandbagging, MBOs were almost universally thought of as, at least in part, an HR program, a performance management program that heavily influenced goals and rewards of the employees. And they usually were deployed all the way down to individual employees. All of this incentivized the employees to sandbag the goals to things that were going to be easy to achieve and cook the books to get the results that would produce their bonuses and promotions. OKRs, there are many organizations that ruin the OKR program by treating them the same way. It's the most devastating and common anti-pattern in OKR implementations is to fail to make it clear that this is a strategy realization program.

36:19This is not an HR project. This is not performance management. And this does not directly influence your bonus. As soon as an employee thinks that an OKR influences their bonus, you'll never see another ambitious objective set by anybody in the company again forever. And there's no one doing it. Once you screw it up and everybody sees this as a performance management program, it's done. You'll have to come up with some completely different framework and start over. So, you know, that's the most important thing. It also is one of several really powerful arguments against doing individual OKRs, OKRs for individual employees.

37:04Take it down to the team level. I generally advise leaving it there. Even if you're committed, for whatever reason, to ultimately have individual OKRs for every employee, that's an order of magnitude more complexity and transactions and things to track and trace than stopping at teams so by all means just do teams for a year a new okr program takes a year to settle in and become muscle memory and a process that's fairly self-sustaining where the organization's really competent at it um don't don't increase the likelihood of failing at your OKR implementation by increasing the scope of it in an order of magnitude by pushing it down to individual employees when you still suck at it.

37:56You haven't even got good at it yet. I love that. I acknowledge you are not great. Nobody's great when they start a whole new process from scratch, right? Whatever it is, lean, agile, you know, a million other things. It takes time to get good. And so we've taught you, you've peppered some really great tips throughout this podcast of things to not do, like how to go wrong. What are the, what are the rest of the do's and don'ts around OPR? Well, um, transparency, let's do a do let's be positive for a second. Um, a positive pattern is, is transparency. Um, you know, there's obviously some cultural there's a pretty significant shift in culture and leadership styles in some organizations to really get the best of the OKR program and really get good at adaptive strategy.

38:57This is the whole point. The capability we're trying to develop here is the ability to realize our strategic objectives and eventually raise to a level of competency that allows us to also be adaptive in doing so. So, well, one of the things that is really important is that OKRs are transparent. Ideally, our default answer should be that every OKR for every team, every function, every department, every product line is visible to everybody in the organization. And especially their day to day progress on the KRs. Right. Are they on track? Are they off track? How are they doing? Obviously, if we're going to lay off a whole department to outsource them or something, that doesn't need to be transparent, shouldn't be transparent at that level.

39:45So another positive, the KRs, these numbers, they're coming from somewhere. The general ledger, the CRM system, the marketing automation system, warehouse, there's a million places that could be the source of record for the number in the KR. It's good, if you can, as you mature this process, if those can be automated so that they're always accurate and always timely from the system of record. There are always going to be some KRs that are going to have to be input manually by an employee. But the more of them that are automated, the more trust we have that they're accurate and timely. You know, part of that OKR champion's job is to maintain compliance with data accuracy and timeliness.

40:49So they're chasing people around for updates. The more of it that's done automatically, the less employee resistance because there's less overhead, you know, and the fewer numbers the OKR champion has to chase. So let's say we've done the positive. you've had your positive bundle and energy what are some of the other don'ts when it comes to OPS well we touched on the big big one I mean that's like the third rail you do this you're screwed give it up but don't do too many we talked about that and boy oh boy to organizations bias towards too many more often than too few some of the others would be that that people you know again it's this issue of deploying tasks we want outcomes not outputs do the project on time and on budget what's the project supposed to be accomplishing as an outcome for the business You know, we want OKRs to clearly tell a story about how this helps the business achieve its winning aspiration, right?

42:19Being on time on budget, that's an output. That's not an outcome. So we really want them to be really clear to trace to that winning aspiration, those higher level things that drive the success of the company. And, you know, I think you and I talked about this a little before, but I mean, we hire intelligent people. but you know i i often say you know i have a military background but i try not to use too many there's way too many military metaphors and strategy conversations usually but one that that i do use is don't be saddam hussein's army right um be the u.s army the u.s army the leadership intent is sort of outcome based you know your your mission is to seize some high ground where you can oversee and control Sector Zulu.

43:16The company commander has given enormous latitude to figure out how best to do that. Saddam Hussein's army says, okay, you're going to walk down the hill. You're going to hang a left at the tree. You're going to hang a right at the rock. You're going to jump over the stream right here. You're going to get 30 steps up that hill, and then you're going to side hill it until you're at exactly this point. Well, as soon as he gets to the stream and it's a flooded stream and he can't cross it, he's on the radio waiting for instructions. And the question goes all the way up the chain of command and the answer comes all the way down the chain of command.

43:49And if the radio is broken, they're paralyzed or making bad decisions, right? This is exactly how strategy and organizations work. If you give people leadership intent with a big picture of what, you know, what's the key to winning and let them figure it out, they're going to come up with much better, faster answers than if you're just deploying tactics and tasks up and down the chain all the time.

44:17And that's incredibly useful, I think, in terms of how do we empower teams with this methodology. One question for you. We talk very much about large organizations with lots of big execs and big departments and teams. How does this framework apply in small organizations? And do you have any advice for... It absolutely does. And it's so much easier. You still... Look, I worked through a tier one venture capital firm with a bunch of their portfolio companies helping them implement better strategy programs using Ocares, mostly. me. Some of them were really committed to other processes. And, you know, so it's like, I'm not a OKR zealot so much as I am about just come up with a good program that works.

45:12And so in a venture funded startup, you're more likely to have one product instead of 10 that are competing for resources that are all at different stages of their economic life cycles in the market, etc. Right. So your portfolio allocation processes are simpler. But you're also making really big bets while you're burning other people's money. And, you know, I've been an executive in several startups. And, you know, one of the first things you talk about is, you know, what's our splat against the wall day today? You know, you're burning capital. You're not generating much revenue. You're cashflow negative.

45:57And at some point you can't make payroll and you damn well better make an impact on the market, prove problem solution fit and product market fit before that splat against the wall date hits. So you're making really important decisions about which market segments, which personas, which problems are we solving to maximize the time we have with the money we have. And so that it's a little different conversation. But boy, that strategic clarity is so important, because if you're a venture funded startup, and you've got six months till you're out of out of capital, you better be making the right trade off decisions and not doing more than you can juggle, you know, in things that aren't fruitful.

46:48and final question right what are your top tips because i'm very aware that i could keep asking you questions all all evening um evan i'm not sure you'd want me to do that so final question what are your top tips for for somebody that's just starting out with okrs and wants to get them Right. Well, so first of all, keep in mind with utter clarity in your leadership mind that this is a strategy deployment and execution program. that's what it is and every time you make a decision about how you design your OKR program think first about how to maximize the effectiveness of it being a strategy program don't get pulled in you know and I have nothing as CHROs HR people are wonderful and they're and they're great but don't let them pull this into becoming a performance management process

47:56and read a good book on how to implement OKRs. I think I have, you know, my personal favorite is this one. I think it's pretty good. John Doerr's book, which is the most well-known OKR book, is a good book to get excited about OKRs, but it's a crappy book about how to implement them because the stories he tells are all contradicting one another and there's some really bad anti-patterns exemplified in some of them. Whereas this book just says, here's how you implement an OKR program. And it doesn't have many things that I, hardly anything that I emphatically disagree with. And it wouldn't hurt.

48:35Before you move on from that, for those that are listening to this rather than watching it, do you want to just read out the title and the order? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. So this book's been around a little while. The guys that wrote it are really good in the field. It's called Objectives and Key Results, shockingly. And the authors are Paul Niven and Ben LaMorte. It was published by Wiley, and it's still readily available. Amazing. We'll pop that in the show notes as well, so you've got a nice link to that one. And I have a link to it on the website for my book as well. So my book, Adapt to Win, The website is adapt2win.co, C-O, not com.

49:19And my book uses OKRs as the steel thread from strategy to all the investment and work allocation decisions the organization is making. But it is not a complete treatment of how to implement OKRs. But it really does help you understand how OKRs are ensuring, can ensure that the investment decisions you make across your entire corporation are guided not just by ROI or IRR or whatever, but by strategic impact. because an innovation initiative doesn't have an ROI. And if you're just a monkey with a calculator who's running ROI on all your project and investment candidates, you're going to fall behind competitively because you're not innovating and being creative and disrupting.

50:19So that's the big promise of my book is how do you make sure that you're maximizing the strategic impact of your corporate investments. And I'm really excited that in our next episode, episode three of us together, we're going to get into that portfolio management piece, which is exciting as well. Some meaty, meaty stuff in there. Let's hope we can fit it into one podcast. I doubt it, but we'll give it a blooming good go. So, well, thank you so much, Evan, for another fantastic episode. I think this has been so insightful. And to all of our guests, to all of our listeners, if you have enjoyed this episode and got value from it, one, please leave us a review, send me a message or share it on your favorite social platform and tag me in.

51:11I'd love to get some feedback on the content that we're producing because I've got a new plan coming in place for 2027. I can't believe we're almost there. and Evan, just a reminder for those that have enjoyed this, they enjoyed the last one and want to learn more about where to find you and where to get the book. Can you just remind us again where's the best place to find you? Probably the easiest place is to go to adapt2win.co and it has the links to half a dozen booksellers who stock the digital and hard copy versions of the book. Yeah. And by all means, you know, reach out. I love talking, as you can tell, I really enjoy talking about this stuff and not just with you who are delightful, but I'll talk about it with anybody.

52:00And so yeah, check out the book and follow up with me and Hannah and we'll go from there. Brilliant. Well, thanks everyone for listening and we see you next time on the CFO 4.0 podcast. Thank you.