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...

In this episode, WorkBoard CEO Deidre Paknad is joined by Patrick Thompson, former Chief Information & Digital Transformation Officer at Albemarle, for a special fireside chat live from Accelerate 2023. Patrick has played a pivotal role in building multiple Fortune 500 companies, most recently contributing to the tripling of revenues from $3B to $9B in just two years. If you've refreshed your strategy for the next year, it's time to be highly intentional about strategy execution, and...

In this episode, Deidre first discusses 4 common communication fails that undermine strategy operations leaders and executives and the simple word judo moves that work. Spoiler alert: "Do OKRs" is one of the biggest fails! She then zooms out to discuss how to communicate to mobilize people by meeting them where they are. Deidre provides a framework and guide based on your audience’s scope of responsibility and their change readiness which you can also read here. Knowing why people would...

Bryan Hope, Director of Unified Communications & Collaboration at VMware, joins Deidre Paknad to discuss the importance of harmonizing Team and Personal OKRs for greater impact, why and how VMware is doubling down on Generative AI to increase productivity and automation for both employees and customers, and how an efficient operating rhythm is the most critical, and often overlooked, component of great strategy execution.

Summers Hutchings, Director of Product Delivery & Portfolio Management at CarMax, joins host Deidre Paknad to share how CarMax has leveraged OKRs to bring their corporate and product strategies to life, and emphasizes the importance of empowering cross-functional teams to solve problems and create great outcomes that are connected to the corporate strategy.

What every executive needs to know about OKRs: The power of learning and iteration and the 6 executive failure modes you can avoid from the outset. WorkBoard CEO and OKR Podcast host Deidre Paknad shares her expertise and advice on this podcast so you can gain the wisdom of hundreds of enterprises that have gone before you to elevate your strategy execution and OKR discipline. Download the companion slides.

Cole Wise, OKR Specialist at Pax8 (aka "The OKR Guy"), sits down with Deidre to discuss how the company pivoted their OKR program to implement a new methodology and platform that promoted broad visibility into the organization's priorities and team ownership and accountability for their aligned results. With strong executive support, insights from a community of peer OKR practitioners, and a creative communications playbook, Cole and Pax8 have transformed their OKR program into an engine for...

Tarun Chopra, Vice President of Product Management, Data and AI at IBM, sits down with Deidre to explore the power of OKRs to build strategic clarity and cross-functional alignment in product orgs tasked with continuous innovation, why leaders must model the right OKR behaviors to drive accountability across the org, and the opportunity to use OKRs as a collaborative coaching tool.

Aaron Velek, the OKR Program Manager at Silicon Valley Bank, sits down with Deidre to explore the five drivers of successful Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) at SVB. Aaron shares how he built a robust OKR resource center, leveraged results data for increased accountability and higher-quality OKRs, and fostered internal Champions to drive fast global OKR adoption.

Brianna Ringen, Director of Performance Management, Global IT & Digital Business Office at National Grid, sits down with Deidre to discuss how a single source of truth on strategy execution ‘make lives easier’ while increasing accountability, and the best practices National Grid adopted to implement WorkBoard and OKRs, drive fast adoption, and realize value in less than one quarter.

Jeff Gothelf, business agility and OKR framework expert, organizational designer, author and speaker, sits down with Deidre to share his unique approach to cultivating a product-focused mindset across large, complex enterprise organizations. Jeff uncovers how agile organizations that manage to outcomes are fundamentally in opposition to legacy, command and control leadership practices - and more importantly, how leaders can empower their people with the right framework for autonomy,...

Anthony Coppedge, Principal Agile Digital Sales Global Transformation Lead at IBM, sits down with Deidre to share how he introduced OKRs across Sales and Digital Marketing to ensure the creation of customer value is the focus of every employee in the org, and why a self-directed culture is at the core of successful business transformations. Running his business on fact-based data enables Anthony to validate business goals, navigate with headlights, and inspire deep trust amongst his people.

Cindy Hoots, CIO at AstraZeneca sits down with Deidre to share her unique perspective on driving innovation at speed and scale. Cindy shares the importance of operationalizing the strategy and how it helped get everyone aligned and focused on outcomes.

5 ways OKRs go sideways and why. Tried OKRs and they didn't work or hearing that from a colleague? This podcast talks about why OKRs fail, the root issues, and gives a fresh perspective gaining their true value.

Cathy Benko, Former Vice-Chair and Managing Partner at Deloitte, shares her wisdom on the implications of the way we work and the steps leaders, CEOs, CIOs, and CHROs can take to prepare themselves and their organizations for a thriving and more resilient future.

This week, Deidre welcomes Vikas Butaney, Chief Product Officer and GM at Cisco. Vikas shares how Cisco implemented OKRs, the power of every employee being aligned on the mission, and advice for new business leaders who need to connect distributed teams.

Zendesk CIO Colleen Berbue says "it's just how we run the business" as she shares how OKRs flow into WorkBoard Biz Reviews and they ensure every major initiative has an OKR that clearly aligns to the company objectives.  Teams, time, and effort align and they're building stronger accountability muscles as they grow from 6k people to 10k.

Margo Georgiadis, former president of the Americas at Google for 8 years, leads a master class for executives on why the choice of measures is really a strategic decision, and how clarity and alignment on the right measures are growth fundamentals. Her examples from leading Google's ad business and YouTube are priceless and her experience bringing OKRs to Ancestry.com as CEO and to 40-person startups is equally insightful.