The Power of the OKR Framework (Objectives & Key Results) with Philipp Schett, Wave Nine: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Jan 06, 2026

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In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re talking the OKR framework (Objectives & Key Results) with Philipp Schett. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

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Strategic Counsel: The Power of the OKR Framework (Objectives & Key Results) with Philipp Schett, Wave Nine

We’re always talking about how to create strategic plans and then execute them with intention for immediate action and measurement. As we like to do on this show, we bring forth many different approaches and ways of thinking, because we know not every tool is a one-size-fits-all. Today, that focus is on the OKR framework aka Objectives & Key Results. We wanted you to learn from an expert who knows OKRs better than anyone, so we welcomed on Philipp Schett. He’s the Founder of Wave Nine, the #1 OKR consulting firm. You’ll also love their free OKR Crash Course. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

What are OKRs?
How do OKRs compare to KPIs?
What are some case studies about OKRs?
Who’s in the room in an OKR workshop?
German Beer vs. American Beer

And as always, if you need Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

The Power of the OKR Framework (Objectives & Key Results) with Philipp Schett, Wave Nine
- [0:00] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
- [1:42] Connect with Philipp Schett on LinkedIn, at WaveNine.com, and check out their free OKR Crash Course
- [2:49] What are OKRs (Objectives & Key Results)?
- [6:05] How do OKRs compare to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)?
- [7:48] What’s an example of OKRs?
- [10:25] How do you use the OKR framework?
- [18:50] How do OKRs relate to strategy?
- [21:28] How long does the OKR framework take to apply?
- [22:18] What are some case studies about OKRs?
- [27:03] What is the experience in an OKR workshop with Wave Nine?
- [32:54] Who’s in the room in an OKR workshop?
- [40:34] When is your organization ready for the OKR framework?
- Quick-Fire Questions
- [43:45] Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
- [44:48] La Ventana, Mexico
- [45:52] What’s something Philipp wishes he told his younger self
- [46:02] German Beer vs. American Beer
- [47:03] Connect with Philipp Schett on LinkedIn, at WaveNine.com, and check out their free OKR Crash Course
- Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
- Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

What is Strategic Counsel?

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:01
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place. In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team and your business. Now let’s get to it. Welcome to the Strategic Counsel podcast.

00:31
I am Anne Candido. And I am April Martini. And today we’re going to talk about a strategic framework called OKR, which stands for Objectives and Key Results. As you know, we’re always talking about how to create strategic plans and then execute them with intention for immediate action and measurement. And as we like to do on the show, we bring forth many different approaches and ways of thinking because we know not every tool is one size fits all. So here we are today with another one of those.

00:57
Yes, and before we get started, let’s define OKR a little bit more so we’re all on the same page. The OKR framework is a goal setting methodology for defining and tracking objectives in their outcomes. It involves setting a broad qualitative objective like the what and a few specific quantitative key results, which is the hows, to measure progress towards that objective.

01:22
OKRs help align teams, focus on priorities, and ensure transparency and accountability across an organization. All things you hear us talking about all the time. Yes, and as we often do, we’re bringing a guest to discuss his expertise and experience with OKRs, and that is Philipp Schett of Wave Nine. Philipp, do you want to introduce yourself and just give listeners a little bit of your backstory? Absolutely love to, and thanks for having me today. My name is Philipp Schett.

01:49
I’m the founder of Wave Nine and Wave Nine is an organization. It’s a strategy consulting boutique, about 25 consultants in the U S and in Europe that helps organizations implement the OKR framework. And we have done that now more than 300 times in the past 10 years. That’s when I moved from Germany to the U S and we have learned a lot along the way. And yeah, I’m looking forward to sharing a bit of what we have learned and

02:17
from the mistakes that we’ve made and from the successes that we had. Awesome. And I know we’re going to talk lots and lots of examples so that we can contextualize for the audience. But before we do that, I know Anne introduced the definition of OKR. But Philip, we discussed kind of the key components. And looking at this as maybe a double click into that definition, could you maybe

02:40
Walk us through each of those components and just talk a little bit about each one so that we ground the conversation and people understand the lens by which we’re talking. Maybe before we go into the building blocks of an OKR implementation, I can tell you a few things that OKRs are not or not just. OKRs are at the end objectives and key results. So it’s two elements. Very, very simple. The objectives tell us that’s where we want to go and the key results tell us, OK, we getting there. That’s great.

03:10
But understanding that OKRs would stop at the syntax, that’s where often the misunderstanding comes from. So yes, you’re writing your goals in a different syntax and in a different format. But if you’re just reformatting whatever you had before and now it has a new form, that’s obviously not bringing a lot of, well, lot of new clarity and a lot of new energy to an organization. So…

03:38
OKRs to be successful need to be much more change than just a reformat of your existing goals. So let me tell you a bit about what makes them special. So it’s not just a syntax, it is much more. And that is that OKRs are typically set for a much shorter timeframe. So it’s January 6th. And now we are looking at a year and

04:07
Many of us have made long plans for the year and set ambitious goals for the year. But the reality is that come February, come March, a lot of these goals are going to be obsolete again, because we might’ve achieved some and we might’ve missed some others. And so it’s often very difficult for organizations to plan 12, 18, 24 months in the future. And so OKRs are looking at a much shorter timeframe.

04:37
Then we are also making OKAOS transparent across the organization. So that’s often a very radical shift for organizations to move from everyone just understands their goals and maybe their team goals to everyone sees all goals that were set in the organization. And that is what our clients sometimes describe as a lights on experience. And I love that because it’s

05:05
It’s so much easier to play your best hand if you know your cards. That’s a very important change. And then another important change is that I’m old enough to remember a time when my boss came at the beginning of the year and told us, okay, these are all goals for this year. And that was never a fantastic experience and definitely doesn’t fly with most listeners that maybe are a bit younger. So it’s that change.

05:34
that’s also very important. So we have transparency, we have shorter rhythms, and we have co-creation. And those are just some, but the most important changes we need to be aware of before we introduce a new gold setting methodology. And now I’m happy to go into the building blocks. Well, I had one quick question just because I know it’s probably an obvious one, but how is this different than KPIs or key performance indicators?

06:03
I mean, honestly, it is a great question because it’s not that easy to answer because KPIs are very loosely defined term. I know organizations that have basically called every metric that they track a KPI. And OKRs is also a very ill and loosely defined term. So comparing two terms that mean something else for many people is something that’s very difficult. Let me answer it with how we use it in our…

06:32
in our consulting practice and with our clients. We use KPIs for all of the health metrics that an organization has. So that might be your customer satisfaction. That might be your employee churn rate. That might be, well, whatever, whatever your revenue, your return on ad spend, right? Whatever it is you’re tracking, but a key result is then a KPI on a PIP, on a performance improvement plan. So.

07:02
KPIs are all the metrics that are there. And then a key result is I’m upgrading it to something that we actually want to drive change to. And now in a normal organization, you will track maybe a hundred KPIs across all of those departments like marketing, sales and others, but you can’t make an intentional effort to improve a hundred things at once because then you will most likely not improve anything. And so the difference is that

07:31
Again, the way we understand it is that a KPI tracks the health of the business and key results are the areas where we want to drive strategic change. So can you give an example just to really make it tangible for folks? Let’s imagine you are a marketing department and now you have a few key results and a few key results are, sorry, a few KPIs that you track anyway. And let’s start with those KPIs. So you’re tracking your conversion rate. You’re tracking your return on ad spend. You are…

08:02
tracking the number of marketing qualified leads you’re getting into the pipeline. And maybe you are tracking the number of inbound requests you are getting and maybe of outbound. So you have some KPIs to track, but in this particular quarter, you’re going to make anything happen so that you improve your conversion rate.

08:28
And so that suddenly becomes your key results. So now you’re saying, okay, we don’t want to track our conversion rate at 75 % or whatever, very high conversion rate. Let’s say a 20 % conversion rate. And now you are now you’re saying, okay, we want to move from a 20 % conversion rate to a 30 % conversion rate. And we are saying, okay, now what, what does need to happen to make that? What do we need to make happen to increase the conversion rate? So.

08:56
For example, we could advertise for more Episodona that is closer to our buyer persona. So instead of just spreading our marketing dollars like butter, we are now more targeted. And that could be an initiative that helps me drive that key result up. Now, next quarter, we might’ve achieved that. We might’ve moved it from 20 to 30%. And now we’re happy at that 30 % range because that’s probably roughly

09:25
where we max out realistically, that, we say we improve it further, but more realistically, we might now turn to one of those other KPIs and improve it. So for example, we might improve now with our return on ad spend or our inbound leads through organic traffic by driving SEO. Now, I don’t want to go too deep into marketing KPIs because not every listener might be aware of that, but you can come up with those.

09:53
goals in pretty much every area of the business. HR might have your average time to an offer, right? The very important, very important metric to track there. um Sales might have the close rate or the time a deal is in their pipeline and they might want to reduce that. And so they track a ton of metrics, but they’re only improving maybe one or two each quarter. Okay. So now do we think we can go back to the components?

10:22
Yeah, happy too. I mean, I think that that was good framing. I’m glad we did that, but now I think we can get into like, how do you put this together? How do you set it up for success with that contextualization in mind? Yeah, 100%. And actually it is one of those challenging areas when you, are going to talk about change management in a moment and it is obviously important. And what we are realizing in this conversation is something that

10:50
We are always realizing in our client conversations as well. Some of the people in this organization have worked with OKRs before and are like, oh yeah, you don’t need to explain to me what OKRs are anymore. And others are like, no, no, no, let’s please start at the beginning because I’m not entirely sure I understand how this is different to what we have before. So that’s very valid and it’s a very…

11:19
em It’s a very valid question. Now, let’s imagine you are excited about OKRs and now you want to introduce OKRs. that a bit of a stretch? Excited? On board. No, I’m just using On board. I have met executives that were absolutely excited about the possibilities of OKRs, which

11:42
Sometimes we have to dial back a bit because OKRs are a fantastic tool, but they are not a silver bullet that will suddenly make your company that barely has found product market fit a trillion dollar company. But there has been a lot of attention on OKRs as a topic and OKRs as an industry. And obviously when you compete, organizations compete with

12:11
promises that get bigger and bigger. I don’t think that’s a good way to compete, but ah it has definitely happened and sometimes we need to dial it back. But let’s imagine you’re on board with OKRs and now you’re curious if you want to implement them. I can tell you again what not to do. What not to do is just send everyone in the organization, measure what matters, the most famous book on OKRs, and expect them to read it, understand it, and know exactly what they need to do tomorrow.

12:41
That is very rarely a success, successful, even though we have seen it at 20, 30 or more of our clients where exactly this happened. They’ve sent measure what matters to 250 people and we’re expecting those people to know exactly what they need to change tomorrow. That really works. So it’s important to understand that OKOs are not a syntax change and they are not an event.

13:08
So they are continuous process and that continuous process requires first and foremost, someone to handle it. So you need a team that drives this adoption. And that shouldn’t be your most junior person just because they have been at Google maybe at a summer internship. So Susan, just because she had a summer internship at Google,

13:37
is not a great person to drive this change because you need to A, understand the organization. And you also need to understand where your allies are for this, where your friends are. And then you also need to understand where your detractors are. first and foremost, you need to find the right person. Often it’s a chief of staff. Often it is someone in an operations role, in a strategy role. So that’s really, really critical. That person needs to be.

14:06
empowered to run the program. Once you have that program, once you have that person, you can go and design the process. A lot of executives that are excited about OKRs when they come to us and when they want to do OKRs are excited about it because Google does it or some other company does it. And just because Google does it a certain way doesn’t mean that you can do it the same way because, well,

14:32
your environment and your contacts and your people are different to the talent maybe at Google and the environment at Google, especially when they introduced OKRs in 99 and 2000, right? Very different time to the reality that most of our clients are facing. And so you need to make changes to OKRs that are fitting to your organization. For example, Google has 70 % stretch goals.

15:01
That means that 70 % is now suddenly an amazing success. Now that is okay if you live in an environment where most of your strategic bets are okay to not pay off. And because you have a money printer in the basement, the ads business, you can just try and do stuff. Most of our clients don’t have the resources to do that. so 70 % is suddenly a not ideal threshold.

15:30
Right? Yes, you can stretch yourself sometimes, but we, we rather conservative there. And so you want to design a process that’s actually for you. So you need a person, then you design the process, and then you need to manage the change in your organization. And that also requires documentation that requires discipline. You can’t just send out an email at one point in time and, and expect everyone to, to be on board.

16:00
But, and also because you are on board doesn’t mean your organization is on board, right? Because you are bought in doesn’t mean that Dennis in the account, accounts payable team is bought into this. And so don’t expect the same excitement at all levels in the organization. So we need to manage the change. That’s typically how we, when we launch a series of kickoffs and when we launch different

16:28
campaigns internally, typically an email, a video campaign, a video from whoever the executive sponsor is. And so, and that needs to be ongoing. So you need to launch, but then you need to drive this change for a couple of quarters or sometimes even a bit longer. And then you need to train people and train them depending on their persona. So executives need a different training than someone in the fourth level of an organization or fifth level.

16:57
And that is only an individual contributor. And so they need to interact with OKRs differently. And so they need a different training. And so we use persona based training. And that training is typically also not just the 45 minute video that you send over to everyone, but sometimes something where, yes, we do have on-demand training, but we also know that even in organizations that make it

17:26
obligatory for everyone, very rarely, more than 30 % actually look at such a training. And most of them just skip, right? And, and hey, I’ve done the same with security trainings. And so I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just saying that you can’t expect that just an on demand training will do the trick. And then lastly, we run workshops. And so, and we have coaches, internal coaches that we train a bit more intensively in the OKR methodology.

17:56
that then scale this up. so, and those workshops are extremely important and the last piece of the puzzle basically, because they make sure that people set higher quality OKRs and are not falling into the different traps when it comes to setting OKRs. Thank you so much for articulating this because maybe I’m just going to need some additional perspective because what’s stuck in my brain, especially in my experience of OKRs is OKRs are

18:26
a way of positioning your strategic plan in order to activate a strategic plan. So where I’m hearing you say is that OKRs kind of sit as its own process. And that’s where I’m kind of getting a bit confused because what is it really like if it’s a process in itself, what’s the whole point of the process? Is it used in order to

18:51
set strategic guidance for a business? Is it used as part of another strategic process? um Help me understand a little bit more about that. it is a process that supports the strategic planning process. Whatever that is in an organization, very often it is not a very mature process and therefore very often it is replaced with the OKR process. And so what it is, at the end of the day it is

19:20
the leadership team starting and the leadership team setting a set of objectives, typically three or four objectives at the top of the house and a few key results. And those are then information for the next level teams to set OKRs themselves. So basically OKRs are communicating your strategic choices. So let me give you an example at the top of the house. You might say, OK.

19:47
we are now going up market with our offering. We are addressing our offering to enterprise customers instead of small and medium sized businesses. That might be a strategic shift at the top of the house. And therefore the leadership team is formulating an objective like, okay, we are going to go up market maybe in Europe or maybe in the Midwest. So maybe we start with a geographical qualifier. And then afterwards you have…

20:17
Maybe the marketing team and the sales team set their objectives and key results depending on this information. that’s the next step. After the organization has set the leadership OKR, you’re now in the next level. And the marketing team might say, OK, how do we support this leadership objective of going up market? Well, it might say, let’s do two events for enterprise customers in the next quarter.

20:46
Or we say we go to certain conferences and collect a few leads, depending on what it is and how they can support. At the end of the day, it is a way for the leadership team to communicate the strategic priorities, the shorter term strategic priorities, and for teams below it to make sure that they pay towards those. So is it a way of orienting your strategic planning? So it’s not the strategic planning process, but it’s a way of

21:15
articulating the objectives that are coming from the strategic planning process and then actioning against them. Is that fair? And again, it’s difficult to say completely because I’ve seen strategic planning processes be different in almost all organizations I worked with. But the strategic planning processes that we know are very often much longer term. So it is maybe a two year or three year strategy while the OKR setting processes

21:44
on a quarterly, maximum annual basis. That’s, I would say, the correct way to look at it. If we’re thinking, I mean, you’ve said a few times you get into organizations and the way I interpret it is there’s a strategic plan, but it’s not being actioned against. That is a very common symptom. Yes. Okay. So it’s more a matter of how do we get that, you know, and Ann and I are not fans of Plan on a Page for that reason, right? Because they’re often not.

22:12
actionable in any way, or form. But I’m just trying to give context and maybe you could do it through a case study example without mentioning company or whatever of like, okay, we got into this company and here was the state of the state. And then we implemented OKRs and you kind of walk through like team wise how that could happen. But you and I kind of talked about some of the companies you’d worked with or success stories or, you know, something that says like, okay, very real. This was the challenge. The plan on the page was not coming off that page.

22:42
And so we put this into place and then fast forward six months. Here’s what it looked like at that point in time. One example that comes to mind is a company that I just done a workshop with on Monday. They are a local player in Denmark and a local software company, about 250, 250 employees. The majority owner is now a private equity company, a famous private equity company. And now.

23:11
This private equity company is shifting the focus from Denmark, well, to the internet, to an international market. Now this company is going to be exploring Germany, obviously, exploring the UK, exploring other markets. And that requires another strategic shift, not only going international, but from in Denmark, they have 70, 80 % market share. Like they are the biggest fish in a small pond.

23:40
And now suddenly they are going to be a challenger again. And so you suddenly have to change culture, change mindset, change also performance expectations to move from an incumbent to a challenger. At the same time, well, they have to make sure that they don’t lose Denmark completely. So they have to…

24:08
explore new markets while not losing touch to their Danish customers and clients. so now we started working with them in April, so about eight, nine months ago now. And this was now the third set that we set with them. My guess is that we will do one more at the beginning of the year and then they will run this process themselves. And so what we have seen in this time are a few things. So first of all,

24:38
They have used OKRs to communicate this strategic shift and also make it very tangible. Like if you say to someone in the HR department, we’re going internationally more and we are going to set higher expectations to people, then OK, those are good buzzwords, but how do I make that now tangible in my day to day? And so we have set much shorter term goals. And we have also realized that

25:09
running an incumbent was very much fine in your functions. So in your silos. So marketing was running marketing. Sales was running sales, HR was running product, was running product. And now if they want to build new products, uh third challenge that they were doing, they are going from legacy software to SaaS. uh And basically those are all major shifts.

25:37
one of those shifts would probably almost kill you or it would almost be difficult. It’s difficult to manage. All three at the same time is very difficult for an organization. so what we do and what OKRs do for them is again, make that this elephant that seems so big and cut it down into bite-sized chunks and then make sure that we are not setting functional goals. So not

26:05
marketing goals per se and not sales goals, but are now creating cross-function initiatives that are setting goals together where suddenly people from product marketing and sales that were, I would say before in friendly co-op petition. Or not so friendly. mean, they’re Danish people. They were always very, very friendly, but also…

26:33
Different experience in the United States. Got it. And so, and those are three changes that we are, yeah, we are walking them through and that we are, and that we are now seeing our, yeah, where we have had, of course, also the very normal forming, storming and norming phases, right? Where we had to build new teams to actually challenge this, actually tackle these challenges.

26:59
So you mentioned the workshops. That has me intrigued. So if somebody was doing a workshop with you, can you walk through without giving away the secret sauce or anything like that, but can you walk through a little bit of what is that experience? And then what do people or what do businesses walk out of at the end of the day with? Let’s start at the end. And so at the end, an organization has a very small

27:28
set of actual focus areas in their objectives. Instead of having very broad focus areas, which most often is the beginning of our work, they have now very, very targeted and focused areas where they want to change. Then they have, and those are the objectives and typically it’s three to four. In the previous example, it was basically three, how do we move from a challenger? How do we move internationally? And how do we move from

27:58
SaaS or from legacy to SaaS. Now, those are still very broad and we narrow them down even further in the workshop. That just alone is often a very difficult moderating process because if you ask the CEO, they will most often be able to tell you three or four focus areas, even though some CEOs that want to work with us give us a list of 150 priorities. Oh yeah.

28:25
We have a spreadsheet with 150 priorities that are all extremely important. And when I worked at Meta, probably not the only company that’s doing that, but we went out of space for P1s. And so we introduced P0s. And then suddenly we had 80 % P0s and it was ridiculous, right? Prioritization is extremely difficult. first, you need to moderate that typically because

28:52
And you need to make it very, very intentional and very, very, very clear that those are the priorities and that those are no longer the priorities. So that is very important. And then we’re introducing a set of typically leading indicators on how we know that we are making progress towards those priorities. the case of this company, if you move from a legacy

29:19
legacy IT, you sell licenses to you sell subscriptions, your revenue is actually going down in the beginning because you’re suddenly moving from you sold this disc, very, very legacy for like a million dollars to you are now selling a subscription for maybe $10,000 a month. But suddenly you look scary, right? Your revenue

29:47
goes down. So revenue is a terrible, really terrible guiding stick in this phase. So you need to come up with different, different ones. And that is maybe it is the number of subscribers that are now using the platform. Before you didn’t really care about usage too much. Now suddenly usage becomes everything because you are now selling a subscription. So you really need to come out of the workshop with a few

30:16
priorities, three or four, that the leadership team agrees on. Then you need to be clear on how do we measure that we are making progress and how do we know that we are successful, even if those lagging indicators are turning in the wrong direction. How do we know that we should stay course? Very difficult. And then you’re going out with a shorter list of initiatives that you are doing now to move towards those.

30:45
There’s key results in those actions. And very often we have an organization that is maybe adding five, six initiatives, but needs to cut 20, 25 initiatives. So they started with 60, 70 strategic priorities and initiatives and need to cut it down by to 10, 15 at the max. So really a short number of strategic initiatives. So every objective typically has

31:16
three or four projects, basically. That’s what we end up with. And how do we do that? Well, honestly, it is a lot of preparation work. so the workshop is a very, the workshop is some discussions, but ideally it’s, I tap into my experience from, well, working at the German parliament for a while. And ideally you make politics happen when everyone agrees.

31:46
to something before they even enter the room. And so very, very similarly, we need to create agreement in the room and then figure out where is still disagreement, try and moderate that away or take it offline. Well, ideally we moderate it away in this workshop and try to find disagreement, but then at the end, they all need to commit. That’s at the end. It’s a moderating workshop. We use

32:14
We of course use post-its, there are some methodologies that we use, but at the end it is a workshop where people try and talk a lot and we try and moderate the disagreement. But the most dangerous thing is hidden disagreement, right? Disagreement that shows after the workshop. And we are trying to find out through, let’s say a bit of poking around, aimed poking around.

32:43
where we need to create that more agreement or at least create commitment even if they disagree. So when you’re having these workshops, who’s actually in the room? Because you’ve talked us through, Like leadership sets the priorities, of course. And leadership might have 100 or whatever, which I appreciate. You got to get them down. But as far as, oh now we say this is where the rubber meets the road, right? Like we have to make some calls and we have to align and all of those things. But then you’ve also said there’s different levels

33:12
of making sure that the OKRs are set by department, right? So, leaderships versus doers. So, how do you tackle that? Are they all there? Is it different levels of workshops? How do you make sure that at the end of the day, whatever’s agreed on actually happens? Yeah, is different levels of workshops. And we started the leadership team. Now, there are organizations that start also bottom up, but I typically follow the old saying that strategy follows gravity.

33:42
And so we start at the top. Now that doesn’t mean that after we have, so in the first workshop, the leadership team is present with a bit of a caveat that if we see a CEO that wants to invite 20 or more people, we start with a bit of a leadership trim down because you can’t, I’ve seen it never successful, but I’ve seen it that leadership teams get really, really big. so.

34:11
It’s the seven or eight maximum leaders of an organization. And that is the beginning. And then afterwards we either for simplicity follow the org chart. So then the marketing team gets a workshop, the sales team gets a workshop, HR gets a workshop. And that is, I would say relatively boring, but very often the org chart is there for a reason. And it’s a good start in the first quarter. It’s not groundbreaking to do that.

34:40
Sometimes it gets a bit boring for us because it gets again boring to do it in the functions, but it still is often a good way. then the leadership, then the marketing head sits there with their team and then creates those OKRs. And that is a bridge between the leadership team and the next level team, right? There’s always someone who was involved levels. And if you have multiple levels, then you just continue it down. Now.

35:10
Important that sounds like cascading in our understanding cascading would be mean we dictate the level, the goals down. We call it localization because the marketing team is informed by the choices and the goals of the leadership team, but still sets their own set of goals. Everyone ha and they can change it. They just need to explain it later on to the leadership team, why they changed it. So that’s an attire.

35:39
But they can. so now that’s a bit nuanced, obviously, some CEOs want more control and others are a bit more leeway. So that is always a bit dependent on the company. But the way we moderate it is always a setting on the next level. And then on the third level and fourth level and so on and in large organizations, that can mean we do a couple of hundred of them in a week.

36:06
As I say, let me say what I like about the process. So what I do like about the process for sure is the fact that it does drive clarity and focus. And those are the things that we highly stress in organizations, especially when it feels maybe a little frenetic or people feel like they’re doing a bunch of things, but they don’t know exactly why they’re doing them, right? Or they’re not sure of how their work ties back up to the broader business objectives or the broader business goals.

36:31
So I love this process for the fact that it drives clarity and it drives clarity down through the whole entire organization. So everybody knows what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and how it connects to the overall big picture. The one thing that I do want people to hear and I want them to take it away and you may have a different point of view on this, Phillip, but what I want people to understand is that this is not an arbitrary process. What I want people to understand, this needs to be contextualized in bigger and broader understanding.

37:01
of what the business needs. So this isn’t just, or it shouldn’t just be the CEO dictating, well, we want to grow like 20 % this year. There should be a process that articulates where the focus is already supposed to be oriented against like, okay, how are we going to go do this? OKRs try to crystallize that into specifics.

37:22
But if you’re gonna just go into a workshop, again, Phil, you can definitely correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re just gonna go into a workshop and you’re gonna expect that all to be drilled down with no context of what markets are appropriate, because maybe we need to do a market analysis, maybe we need to do some customer or consumer research to understand what they need, maybe we need to pay some attention to innovation pipeline, all of these different things that help you to shape what the next stages of your business.

37:51
That is all important and critical inputs. As you mentioned in the beginning, Feld, the OKR is not a silver bullet. You’re not gonna go walk into a session and be like, okay, I’m just gonna go through an OKR session and it’s going to solve all of my issues because it’s gonna set all the goals. Because all it’s gonna do then is set something that’s arbitrary based on inputs that aren’t fruitful for what you want your business to go do. So…

38:16
That’s just kind of like a little bit of contextualization. think that is, is important, but I invite you to, to comment on that or provide different thoughts or points of view. She’s looking for an argument. No, I’m just kidding. no disagreement at all. The, think one of the bigger mistakes that I’ve done when we introduced this was not making sure that there is an actual strategy at the organization. And if their strategy is.

38:45
grow 20 % or any variation of just row harder, just move faster, then that’s not a strategy. So that is wishful thinking, right? And just doing more of what you’re already doing is leads to very boring and very misaligned and typically also frustrating OKR setting sessions. So you’re absolutely right. It can’t be arbitrary. It needs to…

39:14
It needs to support an actual strategy that has made all of those choices. Like, okay, which markets do we play in? Which markets do we not play in? What are the bets? are, so all of that, all of that is absolutely, absolutely true. And I have worked with organizations a few years ago where that wasn’t the place. And sometimes it’s also, I don’t want to, this is difficult territory, but I found it, especially when I was 10 years younger.

39:43
to be extremely difficult to go into a room of people that are twice my age and are very proud of their, let’s go 20 % this year strategy. Right. And then they have to call the baby ugly and tell them that’s not a great, that’s not exactly how are we doing it? Right. Oh yeah. I let my people figure that out. I love that. Right. That’s, but no, it’s very unlikely that your marketing, marketing leader and your sales leader.

40:12
will have exactly the same opinion on how to figure this out and can agree on one. And even if then there’s still product who’s maybe also might have a different opinion. It’s very important that an organization is actually able to formulate a strategy that is an actual strategy, which means they actually make choices. who is the ideal target, right? For this kind of work. Like, so set the stage for the opposite of that, right? You walk in and it’s like, okay, we’re

40:41
ready and you know, you’re like, oh yeah, they’ve ticked these boxes. Like, how does an organization say, okay, I’m ready for this framework? My favorite organizations to work with are the ones that have a strategy, but also have urgency. If you don’t have urgency, meaning that maybe everything is just golden and you’re sailing and it’s a lifestyle business, right? We can make it maybe grow from 20 to 22%, right?

41:10
That’s typically very difficult to make any change happen in that organization because people are rightfully asking, what do we do this for? Everything is, everything is great. And my favorite organizations have clarity, urgency, bit of capability, meaning that they have the internal people that can actually make it happen because otherwise if any of those three are missing, if clarity is missing, we are going to get

41:39
to a set of 10 to 15 OKRs at the first level. if you localize 15 OKRs at the first level, you get to 500 at the next level. That becomes a nightmare. If you don’t have urgency, it’s very difficult to create the energy and create buy-in for this. And if you don’t have the people that needs to really execute this, ah then it becomes a process that’s just dependent on an external consultant.

42:08
And then very often it goes like a rubber band and he stretched the organization and then it goes back to the original state once you left. so that’s, that’s often very disappointing and not a great case study. We want clients to be sustainably successful because otherwise they, can’t put them on our website as the successful case study. I have a sweet spot for organizations that are typically 150 people and up and maybe two, five, 600.

42:38
Now we do work with larger organizations, but very often we break them down into smaller nuggets, so to say. So smaller business units, which very often is already the case. So we love to work with either businesses or business units that are roughly 150 to 5, 600. And we love working with like 80 % of our clients are in the US. I mean, primarily because that’s where we started the business, right?

43:07
But we also love working with American companies because they have very often a bit of urgency built in for better or worse, right? that’s the American business climate often drives on urgency. Yes. We’ll leave it there. All right. Well, we’ve talked about a lot of things today, but before we wrap up, are you good with a few rapid fire questions?

43:36
Oh, I love it. Yes. Okay. So the first one we ask everybody it’s what are you reading or listening to right now? The book is called Abundance by Esfand Fine. I love the book because it is a positive book. And yes, you might rightfully ask, okay, how do we make all of that happen? But he’s talking about a better future. And I think with all the dooms talk, and it’s so easy to get

44:04
become pessimistic and to become very. Sinistic and, and I am the same sometimes, right? And so he has written a book that is 100 % positive and 100 % excited about the future that could be. He also says that isn’t the future that is guaranteed, but there is a better future that is possible. And I love that book for that reason.

44:30
Favorite place that you have lived, you don’t have to say the US, we won’t hold you to that, favorite place you’ve lived? California and especially San Francisco have been a fantastic place to live for forever. And Alameda where we have our house, it’s a fantastic place for the family. Now, of all the places that I’ve ever lived, I would call out La Ventana, which is a little kite surfing village in Baja California, Mexico.

45:00
And we have spent a few winters there during and after, after COVID. Um, and our, was our daughter’s first, first daycare. That was just a fantastic experience being a German American family in Mexico, the middle, absolutely the middle of nowhere in the desert where you have sometimes no running water and no, and no, you can’t order from Amazon. You were stuck there for a few months without.

45:28
without Amazon and for me as basically someone who was probably Amazon Prime addicted for some time in my life, that was very healing. And so that was probably my favorite place. All right. And the final one, you mentioned a few times like your younger self or, you know, experiences you had. What is one thing you wish you had known or would have told yourself when you were that younger self? It’s all going to be fine. I like that.

45:58
German beer or American beer? American beer 100 % all the time. Wow, really? Absolutely. Whoa. Are you going to be able to go back to Germany after saying that? He’s in Germany now, aren’t you? Yeah, I’m in Germany right now and I’m telling everyone that German beer has become very, very boring, unfortunately. High quality but very boring. so you basically get the 10 most popular beers are all pills. And so… you have variety here.

46:26
Exactly. so I have to search long and hard to find a good IPA, to find a good stout, to maybe even find a couple of good sours. It’s almost impossible here. so America’s blessed with so many great breweries. And I hope that you, yeah, that many of the listeners appreciate what they have because it’s a very unique country in that.

46:55
sense. Well, we love that answer. All right, Philipp. So anything else to close us out and please make sure you tell people where they can find you if they want to continue the conversation. Thanks for having me. uh if you want to connect with me, wave9.com is our website. We have a free course on OKRs ah that will teach you all of the essentials. The OKR crash course right on the homepage. And you will find me on LinkedIn as Philipp Schett.

47:25
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