Why OKRs and KPIs Are Bullshit: A Case Against Corporate Worship

Whenever someone says, “let’s set some OKRs,” I feel a part of my soul leaves my body. A freshly printed “Q1 Objectives” deck gets its wings somewhere in the bowels of corporate hell. And for what? To justify busy work? To keep middle managers feeling important? Let’s cut through the jargon and call it what it is: a massive waste of time designed to look like progress.

Here’s why OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are bullshit—and, frankly, why you should be sceptical of anyone who insists they’re essential.

1. OKRs Don’t Drive Success—They Measure Theater

OKRs are the PowerPoint of goal-setting: shiny, structured, and utterly hollow. Companies roll out these elaborate frameworks where every task is shoehorned into some arbitrary “objective.” But let’s be real—half the people filling out those OKRs have no idea what they’re doing. They’re just playing along because “alignment” sounds better than “I don’t care.”

What’s worse? They rarely drive action. They’re retroactive. Most OKRs are written to reflect what teams already planned to do. It’s like grading yourself on a test after seeing the answers.

2. KPIs: Numbers That Don’t Mean Anything

KPIs are sold as mystical metrics that unlock business insight. But in practice? They’re just cherry-picked numbers that look good in a quarterly meeting. KPIs often prioritise what’s easy to measure over what’s important to track. The result? Endless graphs of nonsense, like website clicks, don’t tie back to outcomes anyone cares about.

Take sales metrics, for example. A KPI might measure how many leads were “generated.” But what if those leads were useless? What if they wasted hours for the sales team? No one questions it because, hey, the KPI was green. Data doesn’t lie. (Spoiler: It absolutely can be misused.)

3. They Create Incentives for Mediocrity

OKRs and KPIs encourage teams to sandbag their goals. Why shoot for excellence when you can crush a low-hanging target? People learn quickly that it’s better to pick safe objectives and manipulate metrics than to take real risks. The result? A culture of mediocrity wrapped in a façade of accomplishment.

Imagine a software team whose KPI is to reduce bug tickets by 20%. Great, now they stop reporting half the bugs. Problem solved! When you reward people for gaming the system, don’t act surprised when they treat it like a game.

4. Corporate Buzzword Overload

Let’s not ignore the insufferable language around OKRs and KPIs. “We need to cascade objectives.” “Ensure vertical alignment.” “Drill down into the key results.” At some point, it stops being a strategy session and starts sounding like a parody of corporate jargon.

The truth? Most of this is noise. People spend more time refining their OKRs than doing the actual work. If your team’s energy is going into debating whether something is a “key result” or a “milestone,” you’ve already lost.

5. They Kill Creativity

The dirty little secret about OKRs and KPIs is that they’re anti-innovation. True creativity doesn’t thrive under rigid frameworks and numeric goals. It thrives when teams are trusted to experiment, fail, and iterate. However, risk-taking disappears when every task is tied to some predefined metric.

Why try something new if it might make your KPIs look bad? It is better to stick to safe, predictable work. And that’s how companies kill the very innovation they claim to value.

So What’s the Alternative?

The problem isn’t just OKRs and KPIs themselves—it’s the blind faith in them as sacred tools. Businesses don’t need more acronyms; they need common sense. Trust your teams. Focus on solving problems. And if you must track progress, do it in a way that reflects impact, not activity.

Here’s a wild idea: ditch the frameworks. Try asking your team two simple questions every quarter:

• What’s the most important problem we can solve?
• How will we know if we’ve solved it?

That’s it. No dashboards, no spreadsheets, no soul-sucking meetings. Just clarity and action.

Final Thoughts

OKRs and KPIs are modern-day corporate astrology. They’re vague enough to apply to anything but specific enough to feel important. Don’t let them distract you from the real work. Burn the buzzwords. Free yourself from the tyranny of “measurable outcomes.” Your team deserves better than this performance-theater nonsense.

Stop worshipping the process. Start focusing on the results. And if anyone asks why you’re not filling out your OKRs, tell them your key result for the quarter is “stop wasting time.”