Radical Focus Quotes

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what you need done and let them surprise you”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus

“It’s not important to protect an idea. It’s important to protect the time it takes to make it real. You”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus

“A mission keeps you on the rails. The OKRs provide focus and milestones. Using OKRs without a mission is like using jet fuel without a jet.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus

“A mission keeps you on the rails. The OKRs provide focus and milestones.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus

“OKRs help you adapt. No one ever truly understands what’s coming tomorrow; OKRs let you navigate the changing world with confidence as you go. This process harnesses one of the most powerful forces in history: humans’ ability to learn. It builds knowledge, keeps you nimble, and allows you to adapt to nearly anything.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“A start-up’s enemy is time, and the enemy of timely execution is distraction.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“The Objective is inspiring and motivates those people who don’t dig numbers. For those who do love numbers, the Key Results keep the Objective real. I know I’ve got a good Objective when Ileap out of bed in the morning eager to make it happen. I know I’ve got the right Key Results when I am also a little scared you can’t make them.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“One: set inspiring and measurable goals. Two: make sure you and your team are always making progress toward that desired end state. No matter how many other things are on your plate. And three: set a cadence that makes sure the group both remembers what they are trying to accomplish and holds each other accountable.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus

“We start our journey to our dreams by wanting, but we arrive by focusing, planning and learning.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus

“When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it” – Jeff Weiner,”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus

“When you judge people’s success by raw numbers without conversations and context, you end up with all sorts of “hacks”—people cheating to hit the numbers because the stakes are high and failure isn’t acceptable. In those circumstances, no one’s getting smarter; they’re all just inflating a balloon that will pop at some point.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“The OKR cadence manifests new insights through awareness, experimentation, conversation, and reflection. When we live that cadence, we learn, and apply that learning. We slow down and think, and act out that thinking to learn at an even deeper level. Through action and reflection, we build meaningful, practical, deep knowledge of the market. OKRs are built for learning.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Not all learning is about customers and products. Sometimes you learn how to learn. Sometimes teams test out ways to work together, and learn what does and doesn’t help the company move forward.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Don’t just make stuff. Make an impact.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Goals work when they’re inspiring and capture our natural intention for greatness. They should describe what great victory is for every team, and be a real-time rather than one-time rally point for people. When they’re tangible, they provide purpose which improves everyone’s contribution and provides a focal point for day-to-day execution.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Bad form is something to be corrected. Bad behavior doesn’t mean someone is a bad person. They just need help to see it and correct it.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Vague goals are the enemy of progress.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“In 1958, J.M. Gorey used the term the cone of uncertainty. The cone of uncertainty states that the farther we predict into the future, the less accurate our predictions become. However, without a long-term goal, it’s hard to make long-term plans and move from reactive to strategic. We solve this by having specific goals for the near future, and lightweight drafts for the less knowable far future.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“OKRs are not for command and control. Do not use OKRs if you want to control people’s activities. Only use OKRs if you want to direct your people toward desired outcomes and trust them enough to figure out how.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“As a rule of thumb, I recommend having a usage metric, a revenue metric, and a satisfaction metric for the KRs, but obviously that won’t always be the right choice for your Objective. The goal is to find different ways to measure success, in order to have sustained success across quarters.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“There is an old Italian proverb, “Il meglio è l’inimico del bene,” which translates to, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Many companies who adopt OKRs want to do them perfectly. But perfection is an illusion that keeps you from getting to a simple starting place from which you can grow. Ask yourself, “What is the smallest possible starting point to begin my journey to success?” Then do that, learn from the experience, and try the next step.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“OKRs are simple and hard. Running a marathon is also simple and hard. You don’t try to do it in one go. You build up to it.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Companies should adopt OKRs because they seek focus and the acceleration that accompanies it. That only happens if every single person in the company knows what the company OKRs are and can make decisions based on them. Which means they have to remember them. Having only one Objective for the organization helps immensely.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“OKRs are a framework for creating and ensuring focus on what really matters, but they don’t work if you stuff them full of every single business-as-usual initiative you have going. OKRs are not a way to control the way your employees spend their time; they are a way to share your vision so your employees can make their own judgment calls about what’s most important.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Bringing a group of people into a room isn’t enough to make them a team. An effective team requires personal connections and psychological safety. People don’t feel safe unless they feel connected.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Your mission is short and memorable. When you have a question in your daily work life, the mission should be top of mind to help you answer. To make one, start with this simple formula: We [reduce pain/improve life] in [market] by [value proposition].”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“OKRs are most likely to work when a company has a strong mission and when the company hires great people and then trusts them to do great things.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“OKRs are always stretch goals. Start by asking yourself, “On a scale from one to ten, how confident am I that we can make this goal?” A confidence level of one means “never gonna happen, my friend.” A confidence level of ten means “easy as falling off a log.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Once your team is checking to-do lists instead of watching metrics, you’ve institutionalized self-delusion.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

“Using OKRs helps you move the team from output thinking to outcome thinking.”
― Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results