The OKR Podcast

Sam Wilson, CEO of 8x8, discusses strategy execution and why WorkBoard is essential to his success.

Hear AssetMark CEO Lou Maiuri discuss his role as pace setter, setting ambitious goals, and adapting strategic priorities quickly in a hyper dynamic world.

In this episode recorded live at Accelerate 2025, AO Smith CEO Steve Shafer joins Deidre Paknad to discuss how leaders keep strategy moving when markets shift faster than traditional planning cycles.

Bharath Oruganti, EVP at Q2 Inc, has a real drive for leadership excellence. Hear his leadership epiphany and the high functioning operating rhythm that is propelling his organization's success.

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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.

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.

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Milan Červenka, Product Line Lead of Strategic Management at MSD, shares what it takes to modernize strategy execution across a 130-year-old, 75,000-person enterprise.

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.

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Rory Thompson explains how Pax8 built consistent 10-out-of-10 meetings with OKRs, L10 habits, and WorkBoard to free time and improve execution.

Harry Blease from British telecom giant Virgin Media O2 started with the “why” of OKRs as the foundation for his implementation. He anchored on what leaders hoped to accomplish with OKRs – alignment, accountability, transparency.

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Guest Alexis Kearns, Chief People Officer at GHX, shares her approach to OKRs and performance management, the hard conversations, team OKRs and effective managers, and the CEO-CHRO partnership.

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Jaclyn Pedersen, Director of OKR Strategy and Alignment at GHX, lays out how she's improving alignment and execution in 2025, from strategy execution workshops with cross-functional VPs, to really intentional retrospectives focused on learning and actually making changes, to making accountability easier for everyone.

CEO and Co-founder Deidre Paknad and Sameera Moinpour, Global VP Customer Success & Services, give a debrief from WorkBoard's Fall Executive Advisory Board sessios.

Recorded live at WorkBoard’s Accelerate 2025 conference, this episode covers how organizations have matured their approach to OKRs, strategy execution and the connection with individual performance over the past few years and what's changing next.

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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.

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Deidre Paknad, CEO of WorkBoard, shares how the company runs its business using its own platform.

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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.

Deidre shares her thoughts on OKRs to kick off 2025 and get dialed in on the victories and advantages we want to create at our companies this year.

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Deidre shares her own operating rhythm including defining strategic ambitions, orchestrating execution, setting the pace, and managing the awkward pauses that drive great performance.

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In this episode, WorkBoard CEO Deidre Paknad shares what’s changed and the signs that your managers may not be prepared to succeed.

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Sooner Safer Happier author Jonathan Smart joins Deidre to talk new ways of working, minimizing time to learning, and maximizing time to value.

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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.

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Former 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.

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In this episode, John Glander, Senior VP at JPMorgan 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.

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Patrick shares the keys to the success of the last five Fortune builds, emphasizing the importance of incorporating both lead and lag metrics, along with maintaining alignment with a 52-week cadence to drive accountability.

WorkBoard CEO Deidre Paknad 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!

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.

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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.

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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.

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’.

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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.

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.

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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 episode talks about why OKRs fail, the root issues, and gives a fresh perspective gaining their true value.

WorkBoard CEO and OKR Podcast host Deidre Paknad appears on the McKinsey on Start-ups podcast to discuss how OKRs and a digital operating rhythm provide the transparency and accountability around strategy and execution that companies need.

Vikas Butaney, Chief Product Officer and GM at Cisco shares how Cisco implemented OKRs.

Zendesk CIO Colleen Berube says 'it's just how we run the business' as she shares how OKRs flow into WorkBoardAI Biz Reviews.

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Margo Georgiadis, former president of the Americas at Google for 8 years, leads a master class for executives on how Google uses OKRs.

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Tina Murphy, President of GHX, joins Deidre for a discussion on the leadership lessons of 2021.

Hootsuite CEO Tom Keiser joins Deidre for a CEO to CEO chat on cohesion in chaos.

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3M Automotive & Aerospace Division president Steve Shafer shares his observations on the potency of momentum to accelerate transformation and outcomes.

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In this podcast, they discuss common OKR questions, concerns, learnings and aha's, across many product and engineering organizations.

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Erin Rifkin, General Manager at Microsoft, talks about alignment and measurement muscle, how shared OKRs drive the One Microsoft vision, and why learning is the key to, well, everything.

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Denise Kanfield drives the OKR and results program at Cisco. Before that, she was a business agility and transformation leader at Thomson Reuters for three years.

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Exec coach Jocelyn Kung offers simple steps leaders can take to create trust, healthy conflict and better outcomes.

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Chris Cravens, former CIO of Zynga and Uber as well as former VP, Software Engineering for Splunk shares what he learned about OKRs from Zynga.

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Michael Marcellin, CMO at Juniper Networks, talks about the power of their OKR practice.

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Deidre Paknad, CEO and co-founder of WorkBoard, discusses how leaders can turn current events into a catalyst for revisiting and improving the way teams come together, create value, and drive strategic priorities.

Sarah talks about having good alignment conversations, transparency for thousands of people in 16 countries, and accelerating organization impact.

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Ryan Padilla, Head of Global Planning at GHX, discusses the organization's experience with implementing the OKR practice.

Cisco Security Business Chief of Staff, Anna Birch, and Deidre discuss the importance of alignment to drive growth in large enterprise. Anna shares their journey, including the initial leadership alignment breakthrough, and how they’ve operationalized leading for results.

Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo and Deidre discuss the inverse relationship between a company’s growth and its alignment. As a company scales up, alignment on outcomes often goes down — the strategy doesn't trickle through the new layers and most people get further from customer.

In this fun interview Marcin Kleczynski, CEO and founder of Malwarebytes, tells the fun story of growing his company from its start when he was a teenager to $30 million in revenue from a college dorm room to $200 million and 800 people today.

Mark Organ is a visionary who founded both Eloqua and Influitive and is the author of the best-selling book The Messenger is the Message. In this episode, Mark talks very candidly about the challenges Influitive faced in 2017 that led him to adopt OKRs and the WorkBoard platform – they’d hit a growth wall and the great people in the org didn’t have great clarity on how best to contribute.

For executive leaders, OKRs represent a communication opportunity. They can provide direction and motivation, clarity and inspiration – a motivated, inspired organization wants to achieve its best possible impact.

Leaders want to unlock their full organization’s growth potential, leveraging the OKR technique and other cutting-edge strategies. There is a dearth of information on how to do them well and reap their full benefit of OKRs.  That’s where this podcast comes in!