The OKR Podcast

Sarah Frew shares how this fast-growth startup drives fast, full cross-team alignment from the leadership team to squads and functional teams with OKR themes and a formal OKR Week in which the whole company gives attention to purposeful alignment. She shares what they've learned over 2 years and how their feedback loop improved their process.

Nanci Taylor, VP of Business Agility at IBM, talks about aligning on strategic imperatives, competing to win, and better business reviews. She explores the Capacity-vs-Ambition Gap and how sharp focus on it drives smarter decisions and outcomes.

LexisNexis Special Services & Risk Solutions Government CEO Woody Talcove talks about creating rapid competitive advantage with alignment and focus — creating customer value faster than competitors. He shares the fast wins and culture building experience OKRs enabled and how he got great outcomes in tough conditions.

Mike talks about the power of their OKR practice and platform during the sudden move to work from home Spring 2020, what his personal leadership essentials are, and how his team achieves its best possible outcomes.

Deidre Paknad, CEO and co-founder of WorkBoard, discusses how leaders can turn current events into a catalyst for revisiting and improving the way teams come together, create value, and drive strategic priorities.

David Kreiger, CEO of SalesRoads, talks about how OKRs have helped his autonomous teams stay aligned, avoid the meeting trap, and drive results.

A conversation with: Sarah Davis Director of Portfolio Programs - Data and AI at IBM Sarah Davis, Director of Portfolio Programs - Data and AI at IBM, discusses how she’s using OKRs to enable a very global organization to do its best work for customers. Sarah talks about having good alignment conversations, transparency for thousands of people in 16 countries, and accelerating organization impact.

Ryan Padilla, Head of Global Planning at GHX, and Tiffany Muarycy, Executive OKR coach at WorkBoard, come together for a conversation about GHX’s experience with implementing the OKR practice and how it has improved cross-functional alignment and driven impact for the company.

Cisco Security Business Chief of Staff, Anna Birch, and Deidre discuss the importance of alignment to drive growth in large enterprise. An acquired team brought OKRs in and the Security Business embraced them to unlock faster growth. Anna shares their journey, including the initial leadership alignment breakthrough, and how they've operationalized leading for results. The Cisco Security Business OKR practice helps align teams on common growth objectives in a matrixed org with a deep product portfolio. Since the Security team brought OKRs and WorkBoard into Cisco, it's continued to spread across other business units -- especially those with collaboration and dependencies with Anna's group. Anna has been Chief of Staff for the Security Business Group GM since it acquired OpenDNS in 2015. At OpenDNS, she was VP of People Operations and Minister of Culture. These roles at the intersection of business outcomes and empowering people and culture to achieve them serve her well as she leads the OKR practice!

Zuora CEO Tien Tzou and Deidre discuss the inverse relationship between a company’s growth and its alignment. As a company scales up, alignment on outcomes often goes down -- the strategy doesn't trickle through the new layers and most people get further from customer. Zuora's OKR program reconnects people to the outcomes they drive for customer and company; it's unlocking growth and unleashing the power of teams for this high-growth SaaS company.  In this podcast, Tien talks about the shift to an outcome mindset, how OKRs are scaling managers and leaders to help scale the company, and why every day counts. Tien is the CEO and Founder of Zuora, an innovative company that predicted the modern subscription economy well before others. He is a widely recognized thought leader on SaaS and the author of the best seller Subscribed. He holds an MBA from Stanford. He was employee 11 at Salesforce, where he was CMO and Chief Strategy Officer prior to founding Zuora.