Guest: Sevak Markarian
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Duration: ~ 41 minutes
Watch on YouTube

Ever been in a strategy meeting where everyone nods along to a brilliant plan, only to watch it completely fall apart three months later?

Most organizations don't fail because they have bad strategies. They fail because no one can figure out how to actually execute them. The C-suite has one vision, middle management is stuck translating it, and the teams doing the work have no idea how their daily tasks connect to the big picture.

Sevak Markarian has spent his career solving exactly this problem with Fortune 100 companies like HP, AT&T, and Chevron. This conversation is packed with those "wait, rewind that" moments—like when he drops the surgery analogy that makes you rethink every project you've ever "successfully completed," or when he explains why a deer has a 74% chance of escaping a lion and what that has to do with your team's motivation.

If you've ever wondered why your brilliant strategy turned into just another PowerPoint deck gathering dust, you need to hear this.

Sevak opens with this gut-punch: imagine a surgeon saying those words to a family. Yet this happens in businesses every single day. Leaders celebrate finishing projects on time, hitting activity targets, checking boxes—while completely missing that the actual business outcome never happened. This is the difference between output (we did the thing) and outcome (the thing created the impact we needed).

Most organizations say things like "Build a fuel pump prototype" or "Reduce weight by 10%." That's just an activity with a number. When John Doerr worked with Google, he flipped them: "Reduce fuel consumption by developing a lightweight fuel pump prototype." See the difference? Now we're talking about why it matters to the customer. This one shift changes everything.

A deer has a 74% chance of escaping a lion. Why? The lion hunts because it needs food. But the deer runs for its life—for purpose. When your team works just to finish tasks and keep their jobs, they're hunting out of need. When the work becomes purposeful, they're running with everything they've got.

Real OKRs work bi-directionally. Leadership sets objectives, but teams create their own key results based on how they'll actually achieve those objectives. Maybe the C-suite thinks reducing weight is the answer, but the engineering team sees that optimizing process time is the path forward. When these perspectives collide, that's where you get real alignment and innovation—not just compliance.

Objectives are qualitative and purposeful—they answer "why does this matter to customers?"

Key Results are the 3-5 measurable outcomes that tell you if you're winning. Numbers about impact, not activity.

Actions are the actual work that supports key results.

The kicker: you need regular check-ins—weekly or bi-weekly—for real transparency and adaptation. If you're only looking at OKRs quarterly, you're doing it wrong.

Stop measuring story points, velocity, and burndown charts. Instead, measure things that tell you if you're creating value: How often are you deploying? How long to get changes into production? When something breaks, how fast can you fix it? These DORA metrics can't be gamed, and they'll tell you the truth about whether your transformation is working.

These are the moments where I had to pause the conversation and just let it sink in:

On purpose vs. activity:
"The lion hunts for need, but the deer runs for purpose. If you make work purposeful for your employees, there's a higher statistical chance you will succeed."

On the future of work:
"We're not asking AI to help us do different things. AI is asking us to do things differently."

On what makes good OKRs:
"A good OKR is like a hypothesis—it should be testable, it should have a clear expected outcome, and it should teach you something whether you succeed or fail."

On leadership in the age of AI:
"The leaders of tomorrow aren't the ones who know the most—they're the ones who can adapt the fastest."

On celebrating the wrong things:
"Having teams celebrate 'we finished all our user stories' is like the surgeon saying 'the operation was successful but the patient died.' We need to celebrate outcomes, not outputs."

1. Audit your "goals" right now - For each goal, ask: "Does this explain WHY this matters to a customer, or just WHAT we're building?" If it's just what, rewrite it.

2. Start the bi-directional conversation - Ask your team: "Given this objective from leadership, what key results do YOU think would actually achieve this?"

3. Run small bets, not big transformations - Pick 5-10 small experiments with clear hypotheses. Run them simultaneously. Kill what doesn't work fast.

4. Change what you celebrate - Stop celebrating "we finished all our stories." Start asking "what actual business outcome did we create?"

5. Make your OKRs visible - If your team can't see how their daily work connects to company objectives, you don't have alignment—you have a wishlist.

Sevak has a Doctorate in Organizational Leadership, an MBA, AND a Master of Science in Engineering Physics. He's literally worked in nuclear reactors studying viruses. So when he tells you that getting a leadership team to collaborate is harder than solving complex physics problems, he's not guessing—he's done both.

He's worked with Fortune 100 companies like HP, AT&T, Chevron, Blue Shield of California, Kaiser Permanente, and Farmers Insurance, helping them close the gap between "we have a strategy" and "we're executing on that strategy."

Connect with Sevak: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sevakmarkarian/

He works with organizations on transformation consulting, executive coaching, and OKR implementation. If you're stuck between having a vision and making it happen, reach out. Fair warning: he's going to ask you hard questions about whether you're measuring outputs or outcomes.

You made it to the end. Now here's the question: are you going to do something different tomorrow, or let this be just another thing you consume and forget?

Watch the full episode - The conversation goes way deeper than these notes can capture.

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I'm Kumar Dattatreyan. I've spent over 20 years coaching everyone from startups to Fortune 50 companies. Before that, I ran McDonald's restaurants—which taught me more about operations and execution than any business school.

I co-founded Agile Meridian and created The Disruptor Method, which helps leadership teams actually align around strategy instead of just nodding along in meetings.

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