The OKR Podcast

This episode features a fireside chat with Aprimo CEO Erik Huddleston about the importance of a structured operating model for driving strategic execution, recorded live on stage at the 2024 Accelerate Conference.  Read Deidre's companion blog article on driving peak performance with operating rhythm and rigor.

In this episode, Deidre Paknad sits down with Tina Murphy, CEO of GHX, to discuss the potential of genAI as a transformative force to accelerate GHX's mission of providing affordable quality healthcare. They discuss the challenges and opportunities of adopting AI, addressing employee fears, and fostering AI fluency within the organization, as well as the broader implications of AI in driving organizational efficiency and innovation.

Tiffany Christner, Chief of Staff - Cloud Platform and Engineering at Boeing discusses how WorkBoard, the OKR framework, and consistent operating rituals create a safe space for her organization to collaborate on driving aspirational outcomes.

Deidre shares her own operating rhythm including defining strategic ambitions, orchestrating execution, setting the pace, and managing the awkward pauses that drive great performance. Setting OKRs is the easy part, driving the execution drumbeat is the real work and the real win!

As the VP of Execution and Transformation in the Office of the CEO at VMWare, Joel Neeb led the operating model transformation with stellar results. In this episode, Joel and Deidre talk about better alignment between CEOs and CHROs and the power of managers in the middle to unlock strategy achievement.

Your CEO wants a performance culture, but are your managers prepared to be effective in a super dynamic world? In this episode, WorkBoard CEO Deidre Paknad shares what’s changed and the signs that your managers may not be prepared to succeed.

Sooner Safer Happier author Jonathan Smart joins Deidre to talk new ways of working, minimizing time to learning, and maximizing time to value. Don't miss this excellent discussion on value streams and OKRs and why this pivot is important now. (Learn more in Jonathan's book, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility.)

Strategy execution is much harder now. The tried-and-true management models that drove your success for the last two decades may not get you where you want to go in the next 5 years. In this episode, WorkBoard CEO Deidre Paknad and VP of Customer Success Sameera Moinpour discuss their learnings about how successful companies executed their strategies and transformations in 2023, and make predictions about what the journey will look like going forward.

3M President Steve Shafer discusses the power of his forward-facing management model and the clarity, urgency, and focus it creates in his Automotive & Aerospace Division. He avoids the reactive trap that backward facing reporting and management cause and creates the conditions for success and simplicity.

In this episode, John Glander, Senior VP at JP Morgan Chase, and Duncan Hawksbee, Director of Strategic Execution at Trimble, sit down with WorkBoard CEO Deidre Paknad for a conversation before a live audience of strategy execution professionals at the Accelerate 2023 conference. Both share their organizations' very different OKR journeys and the profound insights they've gained on how to improve enterprise strategy execution. Their wide-ranging conversation covers why focus makes all the difference for a successful program, how one CEO's "rule of 3" made focus possible, and why leaders must adopt new strategy execution tactics before asking others to do so.