strategy-execution
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Deidre Paknad Built a Company Around the Work Between Strategy and Results
After IBM bought her previous startup, Deidre Paknad discovered that scale could turn strategy into slides, meetings and stale status reports. WorkBoard is her long campaign to give leaders a living system for turning ambition into visible outcomes.
Dotwork
Dotwork is an AI-native strategy, portfolio, and product operations platform that connects goals, work, finance, and outcomes so enterprise leaders can align teams and steer decisions with confidence. Founded by Steve Elliott - who previously built AgileCraft and sold it to Atlassian, where it became Jira Align - the Georgetown, Texas company uses knowledge graphs, a no-code organizational ontology, and AI agents to turn strategy that is usually buried in slide decks and spreadsheets into a living, connected operating model. Dotwork raised a $12M Series A and counts product and portfolio leaders at companies like NVIDIA, GitHub, and SolarWinds among its early users.
Pandatron
Pandatron is an AI change-activation platform that helps large enterprises turn strategy into execution. Its conversational AI runs private, role-tailored coaching conversations with thousands of employees at once, then feeds leaders real-time behavioral intelligence on readiness, resistance and risk. Founded in Helsinki and now with a San Francisco presence, Pandatron works with Fortune 500 companies including SAP, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Merck and Skanska to make coaching-driven change dramatically cheaper and more measurable.
WorkBoard
WorkBoard is a Redwood City-based enterprise SaaS company that builds an AI-native strategy execution and OKR platform. It helps large organizations set objectives and key results, align teams around them, automate business reviews, and track progress in real time so strategy turns into a repeatable 'operating rhythm.' Co-founded in 2014 by CEO Deidre Paknad and Daryoush Paknad, the company serves major enterprises including Boeing, 3M, Cisco, Capital One and Workday, and in 2025 acquired rival Quantive to consolidate the enterprise OKR market.
Charlie Newark-French
Charlie Newark-French is the CEO of Cascade, an AI-powered strategy execution platform used by roughly 400 enterprises including PepsiCo, Roche, St. Jude and the World Wildlife Fund. A four-time enterprise software CEO who previously ran Hyperscience and Sharpen, he started at McKinsey, holds a BA from Oxford and an MBA from Harvard, and argues that strategy should run like a live operating system rather than a PowerPoint deck. He hosts the executive podcast 'This Way Forward.'