Hey happy Monday!
The North Star Metric is the most important number in any strategy.
It is the litmus test that the strategy itself is working as well as the only number that can predict the success of the company.
As long as it is chosen in the right way.
In this note, perhaps the most widely read ever–I understand it even ended up on the slides of some course at the university 🙂 – I talked about how to use North Star Metric for a product company.
While Product Led Orgs. are very much in vogue, some companies are just masquerading as such to attract staff. Instead, the vast majority are Sales Driven.
And there is nothing wrong with that, in fact it is an incredibly profitable model, far from cold and unstrategic. Like all things, if done well, it brings great satisfaction.
Identifying the North Star Metric for a Sales Driven business is fairly simple but care must be taken not to underestimate the business.
Numbers have the enormous power to change people’s behavior.
I recorded a short video to show you how the entire business model changes when you choose one number over another.
Can I have your attention?
I have been going through a very busy time lately, both at work and with my family, made up of a lot of moving around and decisions to be made in a short time. In these situations there is one thing that is important to protect:focus.
The ability to direct 100% of mental capacity on a goal. In life as in work.
On a trip abroad a few years ago, I bought a book and have been reading it again only a few weeks ago.
Books should be bought when they call your name from the shelf, then the right time will come to read them.
I also recently recommended it to a friend of mine and found out that it is now available in Italian. So here it is for you as well. Peak mind by Amishi P. Jha.
A few days ago I opened a speech in Bologna with this slide “Distraction, Motivation and Boredom are three taxes we pay without realizing it.” I think all three should have a line each in every company’s budget.
My point is that you can avoid paying these three taxes by implementing Strategy, Systems, and Processes to make your work smoother, with fewer errors, measurable and delegable, and therefore less emotionally dependent.
Attention is something powerful but at the same time fragile. And it depends not only on how work is organized, but on how our lives are organized.
At the same time, attention is a muscle that can be trained, and there is a real training program in the book that takes a maximum of 12 minutes a day. I personally found it very useful.
That alone is worth the time invested in reading, but the thing that struck me most is also all the great amount of scientific research supporting it. It happens that when someone explains well how things work then you can make them better.
I am proud to announce…
I can finally tell about a project that also makes me proud because it will greatly benefit the whole community.
I am among the founding members of the world’s most influential OKR community: Dream with Deadlines.
The community is led by the Quantive team (we have already met Jenny Herald at this STRTGY Meeting) and will not have a commercial purpose but rather to match business leaders with industry experts at the highest level available today.
Among the founding members you will find personalities such as Ben Lamorte who will serve as an advisor, influential consultants with leading experiences along with OKR Coaches in-house from the world’s most ambitious companies such as Renae Fischer of Adobe and Michael Gotein of KeyBank, Vidhya Parvathi of Chagbees, to name a few…
Here is a picture of our kick-off that Dom Farrar, the very talented community manager who will lead the project, sent me.
OKRs in Italy are something relatively new, but abroad they are an established management technique that has amply demonstrated its effectiveness.
Why is it important for STRTGY?
Because I will strive to be a connector between DwD’s incredible expertise and our desire for progress. I will ensure that Italy is adequately represented and supported and that content can be adapted accordingly to our context.
An important step to continue the project of becoming the most pragmatic working group on methodology.
It is also a huge opportunity to improve the tools of MAKE PROGRESS that will be tested, stressed and improved on a new scale.
We are preparing many initiatives such as exclusive content, special events online and live…
As a member of STRTGY you will be the first to be informed and have access to all that we are creating.
A taste? Start with this podcast (in English) in which Jenny and I talk about:
- What is needed to effectively implement OKRs, including leadership consensus and carefully defined and clearly communicated goals.
- The things founders have and their employees want: authority, agility, and autonomy.
- The power of real-time numbers and continuous iterations to measure and optimize OKR implementation.
- And finally … how the 12-week program for OKR adoption works: from strategy development to team mobilization to creating a culture that embraces a robust feedback system to optimize procedures over time.
Speaking of podcasts.
Out today is the episode I recorded with Giulio Beronia for the Future-Ready! column of his podcast That’s Y.
In this episode (in Italian) we talked about:
- What is progress
- What it means to make intergenerational progress
- OKRs and the need to change the approach to work in intergenerational workplaces
- OKRs as a grammar of communication between youth and adults in the workplace
- Advice to my 18-year-old and 80-year-old self (the hardest part of the whole podcast, I never thought of that!).
- A song I listen to on a loop!
That’s all for this week,
indeed not!
If you are going to be at Turin Digital Days on May 9, stop by,
here are the coordinates or email me so we can arrange it,
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ⤴
