Latest news with #OKRs
Business Wire
28-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
WorkBoard Acquires Quantive to Strengthen Its Strategy Execution and OKR Software Advantage and Accelerate Innovation
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today we're excited to share that WorkBoard has acquired Quantive, bringing together the top two players in enterprise OKRs and strategy execution to deliver unmatched AI capabilities, a world-class customer experience, and deep expertise serving the enterprise. The acquisition consolidates expertise and accelerates innovation to help leaders and teams achieve peak performance in a fast-changing world. 'This acquisition combined with our co-sell partnerships with both Workday and Microsoft help us execute on our ambitious roadmap, expand customer value, and capture market share faster.' 'Every enterprise must continuously adapt strategic priorities and align resources to changing market forces. Our AI agents radically accelerate strategy adaptation and execution,' said Deidre Paknad, CEO and Co-Founder of WorkBoard. 'This acquisition combined with our co-sell partnerships with both Workday and Microsoft help us execute on our ambitious roadmap, expand customer value, and capture market share faster.' Over the past year, WorkBoard has rapidly advanced its innovation agenda, launching Chief of Staff and Leadership Coach agents that help organizations and the people in them align faster, drive accountability, and reduce the work of work. These AI agents deliver real-time insights, nudges, and guidance to keep teams focused and outcomes on track. Quantive joins WorkBoard at a time of accelerating adoption across the enterprise strategy execution and OKR category. Our partnerships with Microsoft and Workday further expand the reach and utility of the WorkBoardAI platform, including the new agent for Microsoft Copilot, which brings OKRs directly into Microsoft 365. Teams can ask for progress, get recommendations, and stay aligned without switching context. After Microsoft decided to sunset Viva Goals late last year, dozens of enterprises have chosen WorkBoardAI as their next-generation strategy execution platform. From dynamic scorecards to AI-generated action plans, WorkBoard helps the world's largest organizations better align, measure and drive strategic priorities. As Quantive joins the team, we're expanding our talent bench and accelerating our global community. Quantive customers will transition to the WorkBoard platform over the coming months, supported by a high-touch experience every step of the way. They'll also be invited to join us this Fall at WorkBoard Accelerate, the world's largest OKR and Strategy Execution conference, featuring speakers from Boeing, Mars, A.O. Smith, Aprimo, GHX, and more. As part of the transaction, Quantive investors will take an observer seat on WorkBoard's board. About WorkBoardAI WorkBoardAI is the world's leading enterprise OKR solution and is the only strategy execution system of record with generative and agentic AI to improve alignment, accountability and transparency. Trusted by 3M, AstraZeneca, Boeing, Cisco, Capital One, Elevance, Unilever, Workday, and others, WorkBoardAI makes it easy for organizations to align, measure and drive their strategic priorities more effectively in a rapidly changing world. Its AI helps every enterprise execute better by elevating managers' impact, increasing cross-functional coordination, and accelerating company outcomes. Company investors include SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, M12 Microsoft's Venture Fund, Notable Capital, Workday Ventures, and others, along with prior Quantive investors Insight Partners, Index Ventures, and Charles River Ventures. WorkBoard is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices across the US, Europe and India.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Intel CEO announces layoffs, restructuring, $1.5 billion in cost reductions, expanded return to office mandate
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Intel CEO Lip Bu-Tan announced a series of sweeping measures today, including an unspecified number of layoffs, a company restructuring, the elimination of non-core products, and an expanded return-to-office mandate. The announcement comes as the company presented its disappointing first-quarter earnings report today, causing the stock to decline by 5%. Tan has only been at the helm of Intel for five weeks, but his core message is that the transformation of Intel's culture will be an extended process and requires eliminating the "bureaucracy suffocating the innovation and agility that we need to win," citing that many teams are "eight or more layers deep." Intel has not yet specified the number of employees it expects to lay off in the coming months, but stated that the company will begin the adjustments in Q2 and will implement them over several months. Intel last laid off 15% of its workforce, approximately 15,000 employees, in August 2024. It has been rumored that Intel plans to lay off 20% of its workforce in this round, which could equate to nearly 20,000 more is also reducing its operating expense target by $1.5 billion over the next two years. Intel will reduce its operating expenses to $17 billion in 2025, a $ 500 million cut, and aim for $16 billion in 2026, a further $1 billion reduction. Tan restructured the upper echelon of the management team late last week, but says he will continue to eliminate more layers of the management structure, noting that "many teams are eight or more layers deep, which creates unnecessary bureaucracy that slows us down." He also noted that the most important KPI for managers at Intel has been the size of their team. Tan will eliminate that strategy, instead focusing on creating a leaner and more efficient structure that prioritizes engineering and action. Tan also noted that the current policy, which requires employees to be on site for three days per week, has not been followed consistently. The company will now require all employees to be in the office for four days per week, effective September 1. The focus on efficiency will also extend to significantly reducing internal administrative work, including eliminating unnecessary meetings and reducing the number of attendees. Tan is also making Insights and OKR requirements now optional instead of mandatory. OKRs are a goal-setting method pioneered by company legend Andy Grove that was later discarded, but then loudly resurrected by ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger. This policy shift is yet another sign that a new leader with a different philosophy is now in charge. While Tan has only shared the broad outlines of his plans, they are expansive in scope. "I'm talking about the opportunity to fundamentally reinvent an industry icon. To pull off a comeback that will be studied in business schools for generations to come. To create new technologies and deploy them at scale to change the world for the better," Tan said. "It's going to be hard. It will require painful decisions. But we will make them knowing it's what we must do to serve our customers better as we build a new Intel for the future – and I have great confidence in the power of our team and our people to make it happen." Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button. Sign in to access your portfolio
Forbes
24-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Bias Thrives In Ambiguity—OKRs Can Change That
Image of Sara Lobkovich on a sofa Sara Lobkovich In most organizations, the road to 'equity' is paved with good intentions—but littered with unclear goals, vague expectations, and shifting accountability. These conditions don't just lead to missed deliverables; they fuel invisible bias, gaslighting, and burnout—especially for historically marginalized employees who are already navigating structural inequity at work. OKR (objectives and key results) expert Sara Lobkovich, offers a powerful thesis: if we want to care for underserved employees and drive real progress at a time when our civil rights and free speech are under attack, we need to stop using vibes and start using data. This way of working can shift power into the hands of neurodivergent professionals, women of color, introverts, and folks who don't conform to dominant norms. In a landscape where DEI efforts often get reduced to checklists—heritage month events, implicit bias trainings—a modernized approach to OKRs offer a much-needed shift: from activities to outcomes. That means defining success as progress toward justice, not just activity on a calendar. This isn't just semantics. It's a systems-level intervention. When equity efforts are tied to strategic goals—and when those goals are tracked, reviewed, and adjusted with the same rigor as revenue targets—we stop treating inclusion as charity and start treating it as leadership. Her approach doesn't just improve organizational performance—it fundamentally redistributes power. Bias in the workplace isn't always overt. It often lives in the cracks: a performance review based on 'gut feelings,' a DEI plan with no clear outcomes, or goals that shift mid-quarter without explanation. Lobkovich experienced this first hand leading diverse teams in corporate America. 'We had hard data. We had expectations we thought were agreed on. But when it came time for evaluation, leadership had moved the goalposts on the objective success criteria. That disconnect cost good people their jobs,' she shared during a recent conversation. What makes her approach different isn't just that it helps organizations meet goals—it's that it reframes OKRs as an anti-gaslighting tool. Traditional OKR systems often focus on alignment and ambition but rarely yield clarity, changed behavior, or appetite for the hard work of practical application. Lobkovich's fill in those gaps with a structure explicitly designed to protect workers from bias, power hoarding, and subjective evaluation. Traditional OKR systems are often implemented top-down with most of the benefits accruing to senior leaders (pretty dashboards, more control over the organization's activities). Lobkovich's approach applies the same standards and rules to every person in the organization—from the CEO to the summer intern. 'In my earlier career it was routine to have goals change mid-cycle or even arbitrarily at the time of evaluation: suddenly, a completed goal was not exceeded by enough, and there were patterns to who was harmed by those moving goal posts and arbitrary evaluations. When the entire organization follows the same rules, behavior like that is out in the open, where it can be questioned or corrected.' Her approach was developed through years of hands-on experience working with thousands of leaders and practitioners across 300+ organizations globally. Her work builds on the foundation laid by Christina Wodkte's Radical Focus, Paul Niven and Ben LaMorte's Objectives and Key Results, and fills in the gap between the potential and the practical reality of OKRs left by the best-known book on OKRs, John Doerr's Measure What Matters, evolving the practice of OKRs from a silicon valley mainstay to a universal framework accessible to organizations of all sizes and types. Here's how this new approach to OKRs disrupts the status quo: And perhaps most powerfully, the framework treats failure as a feature, not a bug. Missing a key result isn't a sign of personal failure—it's an opportunity for learning, iteration, and honest reflection. That mindset shift alone can change the emotional texture of an entire organization. While many orgs relegate OKRs to project managers or HR, this approach positions them as core to leadership. It's not just about hitting quarterly numbers—it's about how power is distributed, decisions are made, and truth is surfaced. According to Lobkovich, here's what that means in practice: Sara shares the experience of working with a leader with a monumental modernization and innovation mission in a large, legacy organizational culture. While discussing the organization's resistance to calculated and thoughtful risk-taking, the leader asked: 'What if we set a goal to fail more often?' And that's exactly what they did. For a leader to get up in front of the organization and hear a goal that: 'We're going to achieve a 50% success rate on our innovation projects this year (½ succeed, and ½ fail)' is certainly unconventional: and it required the leader to both model comfort with failure and learning through failure; and, to create the actual psychological safety in how the organization operated to back it up. Lobkovich sums it up: 'The responsibility for setting and achieving OKRs ultimately lies with leaders. They're in the big chair. The buck stops there.' As authoritarianism creeps into politics and public institutions crumble, some leaders are realizing that workplaces might be one of the last semi-stable institutions where people can experience fairness, clarity, and care. That's a heavy lift. But it's not out of reach. Lobkovich sees this shift in her clients. 'They're asking: How do we make our workplace one of the few places where people can function—especially those most impacted by chaos outside?' And that's what You Are A Strategist offers: not just a playbook for hitting KPIs, but a pathway to design workplaces that work—for everyone. Ultimately, this isn't just about OKRs. It's about power, clarity, and accountability. It's a challenge to leaders: If you say you care about equity, your systems need to show it. Your goals need to be clear. Your accountability needs to be real. And your leadership needs to create conditions where everyone—not just the well-resourced or well-spoken—can thrive. Because equity isn't a side hustle. It's the job. 📘 Sara Lobkovich's book, You Are A Strategist, is available now as an eBook via all major eBook platforms. The print edition launches June 6, 2025. For more information and to purchase, visit
