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Henrik van der Pol
CEO at Perdoo
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There's no canonical form for strategy execution
Key Takeaway: Strategy execution doesn't have a single correct form. It shifts by company stage, industry, team, and leadership context. The job isn't to find the perfect framework. It's to read the context in front of you and make it work.
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Open LinkedIn on any given day and you'll find confident takes about how strategy execution "really" works. OKRs are dead. OKRs are the only thing that matters. You need to adopt the Spotify model. You need to ditch quarterly planning. The top 1% of companies do it this way. If you're not using AI to rewrite your operating model by Tuesday, you're already behind.
It's exhausting. And somewhere, a thoughtful CEO of a 200-person company reads one of these posts and starts second-guessing a system that was actually working.
The absolutism sells because it triggers something real: the fear that everyone else knows something you don't. "The top 1%" implies there's a club you're not in. "OKRs are dead" implies you need to reinvent your approach immediately. Both manufacture urgency where none exists.
Perdoo supports all possible frameworks: OKR, Balanced Scorecard, SMART, and so on. Each framework may sound unique, but they all boil down to the same thing.
Let's break it down.
Context is the only playbook
The truth is that strategy execution doesn't have a canonical form. What works depends on company stage, industry, org maturity, team composition, and leadership context. What a 50-person SaaS startup needs from its goal-setting process is fundamentally different from what a 2,000-person manufacturing company needs. Neither is wrong. Both can be right for that specific moment.
I've seen this play out with our own customers. Some organizations run tight quarterly OKR cycles with weekly check-ins. Others run 6-month cycles with lighter touch points because that's what fits their industry rhythm. Some use Perdoo primarily for strategic alignment across departments. Others lean heavily on KPI tracking coupled with a few high-level OKRs.
The ones that succeed aren't following a template they found on LinkedIn. They're reading the context in front of them and making judgment calls.
That's the job. It always was.
What you need
All you need is the following.
Strategy execution starts, of course, with a strategy. So you need a strategy, which often consists of an Ultimate Goal (or mission & vision) with multiple Strategic Pillars.
To execute that strategy, you need goals. Goals that will help you keep the lights on (often referred to as business-as-usual), which I like to call maintenance goals. And goals that will help you realize change, let's call them change goals.
Maintenance goals are almost always tracked as KPIs. I have yet to meet a company that doesn't work with them.
For change goals, it's a little more diverse. You can use OKRs, SMART goals, WIGs (Wildly Important Goals; from 4DX), or other frameworks.
Plus, you need a tool — like Perdoo. A good tool covers the entire spectrum: from strategy, to goals, to tasks, meetings, reporting, and everything else that you need to turn strategy into results. It safeguards adoption., removes friction, and puts your strategy execution program on autopilot.
The danger of framework hopping
What framework you use for your change goals, really doesn't matter.
The problem was never the framework. The problem was consistency. Any reasonable approach to strategy execution will work if you commit to it long enough for the organization to build muscle memory around it.
OKRs work. So does V2MOM if you're Salesforce. The point isn't which system you pick. The point is that you pick one, adapt it to your context, and commit to it.
The worst thing a leadership team can do is switch frameworks every time a new thought leader posts a compelling take.
What matters
Once you've decided on your approach, framework, and tool, it's all just a matter of sticking to the following principles:
Clarity. Enable everyone to understand the strategy and know what the organization is trying to achieve. Not in theory. In practice. Can a team lead 3 levels down articulate where the organization is headed?
Ownership. For each priority, make a specific person responsible for making it happen.
Visibility. Give everyone the ability to see how the organization is progressing without requesting manual status updates.
Rhythm. Establish a regular rhythm where progress is reviewed and course corrections are made (e.g. 1:1s, All-hands, Performance Reviews, etc).
That's it. The specific framework, the exact rhythm, the number of goals, whether you call them Key Results or success metrics, these are implementation details.
Ignore the noise
The people I've worked with who are actually good at strategy execution share a common trait: they're not looking for a definitive playbook. They're not anxious about what the top 1% is doing. They're focused on their own organization, their own context, and making pragmatic decisions with incomplete information.
If your current approach gives you clarity, ownership, visibility, and rhythm keep going. Refine it. Don't blow it up because someone on LinkedIn said it's dead.
And if you don't have those fundamentals in place yet, that's where Perdoo can help. Not by prescribing a rigid methodology, but by giving you the structure to build one that fits your context and the tools to keep it alive.
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