Strategy, OKRs and the question that comes first
I'm Peter Kerr. For more than twenty years I've helped leadership teams work out why before how, then used OKRs to make the how stick. I learned that order the expensive way.
A mistake I still think about
Early in my sales career I landed my first big deal. A greenfield site that needed everything: cabling, patch panels, network, machines, software. One of our sales engineers had specified it. I took the margin, took the commission and, if I'm honest, didn't really understand what I'd sold.
When a similar enquiry came in, I opened the winning proposal, ran a find-and-replace on the client's name and faxed it over. Very pleased with myself.
I hadn't read the brief properly. This client already had a working network, recently cabled by another supplier. They rang back furious, wanting to know who I thought I was, wasting their time. Then the sales director tore a strip off me as well.
I'd answered the question I knew how to answer, not the one they were asking.
So I asked to spend a week with the engineers. I crawled under floorboards until I understood how all of it fitted together. More important, I started asking what each client was trying to do before I talked about what to sell them. The machines were becoming commodities. The value was in the why.
I've been asking why before how ever since. I still get it wrong sometimes. The difference is that now I know what it costs.
Peter asks the question nobody in the room has thought to ask, and it changes the conversation entirely.
The problem of today
On a train home to Newcastle not long ago, I overheard a man a few seats along telling his colleague that AI now wrote, in ten minutes, a report that used to take him two or three days.
Fair enough. I've had the same experience. Then he explained that he'd scheduled the email to land at half past eleven that night, with a note saying he'd stayed up to get it done because he knew how important it was.
AI will make you faster at whatever you were already doing. Including the wrong things. Including the pretending.
That's the problem most leadership teams I meet are living with. More output, more meetings, more dashboards, and less certainty that any of it is heading somewhere worth going. The tools have changed. The questions haven't. What do we value? Where are we going? Is what we're doing getting us there?
“I think we started confusing meetings with conversations.”
A librarian at a county council I worked with, on her way out after more than thirty years. I've never heard it put better.
Where are you right now?
Every piece of work starts with a little door: a short, contained first step where you find out whether a bigger piece of work makes sense, and whether I'm the right person to do it with. Only then do we talk about the Big Door.
“We need to work out what's next, and this time make it stick.”
Earn the Right Future
For leadership teams in growing businesses who are about to write the next strategy, and suspect the last one taught them more than anyone has admitted.
“I'm thinking about selling in the next few years.”
Earn the Right Exit
For founders and their funders who want the business ready to sell before a buyer starts asking questions, and want to be ready themselves.
“Before I decide anything else, I need to get clear on me.”
Earn the Right Clarity
One-to-one coaching for leaders and founders who are successful on paper and sense something is off. Built on the Start with You Blueprint.
Running a university spin-out? Earning the Right to Revenue is a workshop for spin-out executive teams finding their real route to market.
The thinking behind all of it
Release
Shepherd
Learn
Re-Architect
Values stay protected. Vision stays tested. Method stays adaptable. Behaviour tells the truth, then the cycle runs again. OKRs are the method I know best. They only work when the first two are right.
Some of the rooms I've been in
Eighteen months with CEO Heath Davies and his leadership team at Clearswift, the UK cyber security software business, using OKRs to prepare it for sale and then to hold focus through the transition. Its private equity owner, Lyceum Capital, sold it to the Swiss technology group RUAG.
With the executive team of the subscription billing platform from late 2021 into 2023, through its hypergrowth years. The work was focus: cutting everyone's list of priorities down to a few big themes the whole company could see.
With the leadership team of hyperexponential, the insurtech pricing platform, when it had around forty-five people and was planning to double. It had tried OKRs once and got a task list. The second time, it got focus.
The book
“Values before Vision. Vision before Method.”The central idea of Earn the Right: Leading with Strategic Intelligence
The second edition is out now.
You tell me what's going on. I'll ask the questions I'd want asked if I were in your seat. If I'm not the right person for it, I'll say so, and point you to someone who might be.
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