“Set bold objectives, attach a few measurable key results, and watch the magic happen.” That mantra sweeps across tech blogs, SaaS conferences, and LinkedIn threads every quarter. Yet inside our holding company, where we start, acquire, and scale businesses across a range of sectors, we quietly stepped away from the OKR bandwagon years ago.
It was not an impulsive decision; it came after several portfolio experiments, countless post-mortems, and one too many frantic end-of-quarter dashboards. The conclusion was simple: OKRs solved a problem we rarely faced and created friction we certainly did not need.
What OKRs Promise on Paper
OKRs sound perfect in a slide deck. They promise:
- Clarity: Teams always know what matters.
- Alignment: Every micro-goal ladders into a single North Star.
- Focus: No room for “nice-to-have” work.
- Measurability: Progress turns into tidy percentage bars.
In theory, that is catnip for a multi-business group like ours. When you shepherd half a dozen new acquisitions while incubating fresh ventures, having every team march in the same direction feels enticing. But running a family of companies is rarely that tidy. The very diversity that makes a holding company resilient also makes rigid frameworks brittle.
Where OKRs Break Down in Portfolio Firms
1. Different Clocks, Different Calendars
A manufacturing subsidiary needs 18-month tooling cycles; a software startup living under the same roof ships code weekly. Forcing both on one OKR timetable meant one side moved too slow and the other moved too fast. We tried offset cadences, but then “company-wide” alignment vanished.
Mismatched Planning Cycles Across the Portfolio
Illustrative planning-cycle length for three subsidiary types over a 18-month window—why one shared OKR calendar breaks.
One column = one month. A single OKR quarter is too slow for software and too fast for tooling cycles.
2. Excessive Overhead for Small Teams
Several of our operating companies are five-to-ten-person crews still hunting for product-market fit. Drafting and grading OKRs devoured the very creative energy those founders needed for customer calls and prototypes. The framework cost them more than the clarity it delivered.
3. Incentive Distortion
Tie bonuses to quarterly key results and you will get those numbers, sometimes at the expense of long-term health. We saw sales leaders pull forward deals with steep discounts, engineers spike scope to hit vanity performance metrics, and marketers inflate trial sign-ups that never converted. The scoreboard looked great; the P&L said otherwise six months later.
4. Portfolio-Level Learning Is Non-Linear
A holding company wins when lessons from one business cross-pollinate another. That knowledge flow is messy by nature, fragments of wins, failures, anecdotes. OKRs demand pre-defined metrics, but genuine breakthroughs often emerge from blind alleys. A rigid target can blind people to the chance of discovery sitting two pivots away.
OKR Fit by Maturity and Team Size
Where different portfolio companies land on OKR fit, plotted by business maturity against team size.
The mismatch is structural: most of our portfolio sits in the quadrants where rigid OKRs fit worst.
The Way We Measure What Matters Instead
We did not throw discipline out the window; we replaced OKRs with a lighter, context-sensitive operating rhythm.
North-Bound Narratives
Each venture crafts a short narrative memo every six weeks. It explains the strategy, highlights meaningful risks, and spells out the single outcome that matters most right now. No percentage bars, just prose that forces clear thinking.
Leading Indicator Scorecards
When numbers do matter, they are limited to three to five leading indicators per team. These metrics evolve as the company evolves. Early-stage SaaS might track weekly user interviews, not MRR. A mature e-commerce brand might track inventory turns, not website sessions.
Capital Allocation Reviews
Quarterly, we assemble founders and functional leads across the portfolio. The agenda revolves around how we are allocating capital, talent, and technology, not hitting frozen targets. Decisions focus on where marginal dollars and hours can earn the highest compound return.
Post-Mortems Over Progress Reports
If an initiative flops, we run a post-mortem within 48 hours. The goal is to surface transferable insight, not assign blame. Those learnings inform the next narrative cycle.
The Narrative-Memo Cadence, Not OKRs
What replaced quarterly OKR grading: a lighter, faster operating rhythm run every six weeks.
No slide decks, no red-yellow-green grading—just fast loops connecting capital to opportunity.
How This Looks Day to Day
On Monday mornings, Slack lights up with six-line updates from each operating company: Where we won last week, where we stumbled, what we are trying by Friday. By midday, founders trade feedback, share supplier contacts, or swap snippets of code. Mid-week, our platform team might jump in to run a quick pricing experiment or build a minor automation script. Friday, we do a ten-minute loom recap.
No slide decks. No red-yellow-green grading ceremony. Just fast loops of information connecting capital to opportunity.
When OKRs Still Have a Place
We are not zealots. Once a business inside the portfolio matures—stable product, predictable sales funnel, clear lagging indicators—it sometimes adopts a lightweight OKR variant for departmental work: think finance close cycles or warehouse throughput. The difference is that the framework is pulled by the team that needs it, not pushed top-down from the group level.
Benefits We Did Not Expect
- Talent Retention: Creative operators loathe bureaucracy. Stripping out quarterly grading rituals frees them to chase upside, not chase points.
- Faster Pivots: Because we center on narratives and leading indicators, a team can ditch an underperforming strategy mid-cycle without waiting for quarter-end.
- Deeper Cross-Company Apprenticeship: The memo-driven approach invites story sharing. Founders read one another’s docs and hop on calls to trade playbooks. That lateral learning rarely shows up in an OKR dashboard.
Benefits We Did Not Expect
Illustrative internal scores (0-100) for three upsides that showed up only after we dropped OKRs.
None of these three showed up in an OKR dashboard—they only became visible after we stopped measuring the old way.
A Thought for Fellow Builders
If you run a single, mature business with homogeneous teams, OKRs may fit like a glove. For a holding company juggling businesses that age, pivot, and scale at different speeds, the framework can feel like wearing six gloves at once, none quite fit. Clarity and alignment remain essential, but the tools that deliver them must be as varied as the ventures themselves.
We learned that lesson the hard way, and we are better for it. The next time your board deck screams for neat quarter-by-quarter objectives, remember that the real goal is not to hit a metric; it is to build enduring value. Use the simplest system that keeps your people moving toward that horizon. If that happens to be OKRs, fantastic. If not, feel no guilt in letting them go. Your future self, and your portfolio, may thank you.
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