Achieved the moonshot of reaching the Top Ten on at last one category Best Seller list: settling in at #3 on the Best Seller List for "Management Skills" and "Strategic Management," and, the book is in the top ten in three OTHER categories -- including some of the big competitive ones!

And then my personal favorite key result: for this trimester, I have a goal of increasing the number of times we hear "I feel seen" (or a similar sentiment) in spontaneous feedback, from [no baseline] to 16 times... and after one day, that trimester goal is 50% achieved!

Want to learn more about flipping failure into learning?

I share practical frameworks and real examples developed based on working with thousands of implementers across 300+ organizations globally. (And we don't stop at writing goals: my passion is facilitating behavior change for goal achievement.)

No fluff, just inspiring and pragmatic approaches that drive real change.

Follow me here, or join the pre-launch squad for my upcoming book at you are a strategist dot com !

Since then, I've actually set key results to fail more often (and to make people mad more often, and to make more mistakes) for myself.

It's a wild thing to make a mistake and then go:

"High five, self! Well done for making that mistake! Awesome job -- now what did we learn?"

It might sound silly, but it feels really good. And really, truly, can change things. Quickly.

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Here's the thing about strategic goals:

If you limit yourself to only what you can control, you're planning, not setting goals.

Real transformation, growth, and innovation happens when you get experimental and creative and curious, even if it's messy and doesn't always look good in a dashboard.

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And the REAL magic happens when people start to learn that data is neutral information.

Not "good," not "bad," just data that we can be curious about and use to inform our decisions. Reasoned, data-informed, less biased and subjective decisions.

And that's good stuff right there.

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All of those things are observable and countable phenomenon. That means, all of them can be the basis of a key result.

"But we can't set a goal about that: we don't control those things happening!"

BINGO!

Truly aspirational stretch goals take us into unknown territory. They're experiments that are so important to run, we write goals around what we hope to be able to influence; not only what we can control.

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One leader had an epiphany:

"Chasing revenue at all costs breaks long-term growth and doesn't drive the right behaviors in non-sales functions."

YESSSSSSSSSSS. Louder for the ones in the back, please!

The most successful orgs in my practice don't use revenue as their North Star -- they focus on value enablers that naturally support growth.

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Most OKR-creation initiatives involve asking the obvious questions:

What should our objectives be?
What are our key results?

But I find that approach to yield low-quality OKRs.

Instead, we started by envisioning the future they want to build -- each, individually, with just 5 minutes of quiet reflection on the question:

"What could be different by January 2026?"

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Want to learn more about making OKRs actually work -- without the BS?

I share practical frameworks and real examples developed based on working with thousands of implementers across 300+ organizations globally.

No BS, just inspiring and pragmatic approaches that drive real change.
Follow me here, or join the pre-launch squad for my upcoming book at you are a strategist dot com!