Building the Flywheel: Strategy to Execution

Previous posts in this series:

1. Customer Focused Strategy to Execution

2. Using Customer & Market Insights to Develop Strategy

3. Translating Strategy to Product & Culture

4. Metrics to Validate & Improve Strategy

Today is the final installment of my series on Customer Driven Strategy, tying together how customers inform strategy, and how that flows to execution priorities and ensuring organizational alignment on what is important.

In the first post in this series, I talked about Commander’s Intent - the philosophy of focusing on the end state and creating a high-level definition of what a successful mission outcome is, rather than an overly prescriptive step-by-step guide - and how that empowers all levels of the organization to react and adapt as the situation on the front lines changes, while maintaining a focus on the successful mission outcome.

But how do you actually implement that philosophy and ensure everyone across the organization is able to move quickly and decisively to achieve your strategic goals when faced with a changing market environment? This is where the concept of Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, is so powerful to create clear understanding and empowerment across all levels of the organization.

I find it odd that so many people and companies view OKRs negatively. In a small company where the organization is incredibly flat and the market is not very dynamic you can often get by without goals and objectives. But as the market gets more complex and you are constantly faced with tradeoff decisions, if you don’t have clear Objectives tied to your strategic goals then to ensure decisions are made consistently and in line with that strategy, you have to have strong top down command and control decision making with lots of reviews and a very detailed process. In my experience, this is a great way to kill culture and slow progress down.

But if you are able to clearly tie individuals Objectives to those strategic goals, and do it in such a way that the ultimate goal is clear along with boundary conditions and measurements of what success looks like - both at the end as well as at key milestones along the way - then the decision making and reaction to a changing environment at an individual level becomes much clearer and faster. Of course this doesn’t completely eliminate leadership review processes, but it does make those reviews much quicker, easier to prepare for, and much fewer in frequency.

To be clear, writing these OKRs such that they are able to be clearly tied to the strategy and flow down through the various levels of the organization all the way from the CEO to the Individual Contributors in a way that truly achieves this Commander’s Intent is not easy and takes practice. And when over- (or under-)prescriptive or done haphazardly without accountability they usually fail or are ignored. Perhaps this is the negative sentiment that some attach to OKRs. But when done well, they become a game-changer for ensuring strategic alignment, setting priorities, and empowering the entire organization to move quickly in executing the strategy.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on customer driven strategy defining what game you’re playing and how to win, creating a strong culture dedicated to continuous learning, and creating alignment and prioritization in executing your strategy.

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