Putting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to work for your publication.

By William Dunkerley

The publisher of a popular magazine recently went to a chiropractor. The treatment consisted of manually aligning her spine. That's a key element in the chiropractic approach.

Now that same publisher is herself faced with performing a different kind of alignment: the aligning of objectives and key results throughout her publishing organization.

Previously the publisher's spine had been in a state of distress. Now it's her company. The business's pains radiate from the impact of the Covid crisis on the economy and on a resultant shift toward a work-from-home business model.

What does it mean when a company's objectives and key results are misaligned? It means that the various parts of the company, the individual departments, are not working together optimally. They are not creating synergy.

A Case Study in Organizational Misalignment

An example of this is in a story that I've told before and now bears repeating:

It's of a magazine that was struggling to survive. After talking with the publisher, I interviewed the key players: the manager for ad sales, the audience development manager, and the editor-in-chief. I asked each one the same question: "What's wrong here?"

The ad sales manager told me that his sales team was doing a great job selling advertising. The problem was that the circulation manager was selling subscriptions to the wrong people, people who had no interest in buying what was advertised. As a result, advertisers would go away when they got little response to their ads.

The audience development manager indicated that her department did extensive testing and had developed highly targeted marketing approaches that were very successful at bringing in new readers. The problem was that the editor was writing to a different audience. The articles he was publishing didn't resonate with the new readers, and they rarely renewed.

The editor explained that he and his staff did a masterful job of creating highly interesting and insightful articles. The problem was that the ad director was filling the magazine with irrelevant advertisements, and the marketing manager was selling subscriptions to the wrong audience.

Sadly, across the magazine business, not all publishers are aware that their business is misaligned. Some attribute unsatisfactory performance to external causes. Others are content with less than optimal results.

The Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) Framework

In the last issue we introduced the concept of establishing a management framework called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The starting point is to set the company-wide OKRs.

There are various opinions about how many individual objectives and key results are appropriate. We'll take a pragmatic approach here.

For definitions: An objective specifies something you want to achieve. A key result is a benchmark for accomplishing an objective.

Ideally each key result should be quantifiable and measurable. However, in publishing we deal in part with qualitative material for which judgment, not a measuring stick, is required for evaluation.

A Sample OKR Statement

So here is an example of a company-wide statement of objectives and key results for a publishing company. It is offered only for illustrative purposes, not as a recommended blueprint. The numbers presented are just for discussion and are not recommendations.

XYZ Magazines Inc.

1. Objective: Operate profitably.
a. Key result: Achieve a minimum of 15 percent net revenue.

2. Objective: Produce an editorial product that will...
a. Key result: Maintain or improve competitive position with regard to editorial quality.
b. Key result: Achieve a 60 percent renewal rate.
c: Key result: Attract new subscribers to replace expires, plus 3 percent.
d. Key result: Meet all deadlines.
e. Key result: Sustain appropriate staffing through training and recruitment.

3. Objective: Secure advertising and audience that will...
a. Key result: Achieve sufficient sales to meet net revenue objective.
b: Key result: Maintain or improve competitive position with regard to audience size.
c: Key result: Maintain or improve competitive position with regard to ad market share.
d: Key result: Achieve a 60 percent renewal rate.
e: Key result: Attract new subscribers to replace expires, plus 3 percent.
f. Key result: Meet all deadlines.
g. Key result: Sustain appropriate staffing through training and recruitment.

Although not comprehensive, this should give you a general idea of how to state objectives and key results that are appropriate for your situation.

Key Questions to Consider

As you go through the process, here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Are the objectives attainable?

2. Are current capacity and resources adequate, or should they be augmented?

3. Is there sufficient expertise for achieving the results?

4. Are you anticipating future conditions?

If you are an association publisher, there are some obvious adjustments that should be made to this. For example, unless your publication department has its own P/L responsibility, you can substitute a specific "contribution to organizational budget" for net revenue, etc.

In a future issue we'll expand the OKR process down to the departmental level, where the approach will be slightly different.

William Dunkerley is principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.

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