Organizations across every sector face the same fundamental challenge: how do you turn a strategic plan into real, measurable progress? For ESSEC Business School, one of the world’s top-ranked institutions with four campuses across the globe and close to 9,000 students, the answer came in the form of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
This case study is based on a session at the OKR Forum 2026 featuring Isabel Torcheux-Vijitkasem, Head of Accreditations and Continuous Improvement at ESSEC Business School, accompanied by Raphaël Kattan, General Manager of Talenco, the consulting firm that supported ESSEC on its OKR journey. Read on to learn how one of France’s top-ranked business schools brought focus, alignment, and clarity to its strategy execution.
Why OKRs? Why Now?
ESSEC Business School is no ordinary school. Founded in the early nineteenth century, it is consistently ranked among the top French business schools and recognized internationally through rankings like the Financial Times. The school operates campuses in Cergy (near Paris), Singapore, and Morocco, delivering education, research, and corporate services.
Rapid growth over the last decade created a familiar problem: alignment.
As Isabel explains: “The school grew rapidly over the last ten years. We now have four campuses, and we need to align on common objectives.”
Higher education today is a competitive international market. ESSEC, as a private institution receiving limited state subsidies, depends on tuition fees, executive education revenue, and corporate partnerships. The pressure to execute strategy with precision is real.
When ESSEC launched its 2024-2028 strategic plan, the leadership team recognized they needed a method to prioritize better, set clearer objectives, and drive impact across the organization. That’s when they chose OKRs.
“We needed a method that could enable us to prioritize better, to make our objectives clearer, both externally and internally,” Isabel shares.
Year 1: Building the Foundation
ESSEC’s approach to deploying OKRs followed a structured sequence:
Define OKRs at leadership level. The executive committee (Comex) set the school’s strategic objectives and annual key results. This top-level clarity was the starting point for the entire organization.
Train one OKR Lead. Isabel was trained for the school. She became the driving force behind the methodology’s adoption.
Train all managers. In the first year, ESSEC trained its 150 managers across its global campuses to understand the OKR method. This early investment in training across the organization stands out as a best practice.
Set key results at business unit and department level. After the leadership OKRs were in place, each BU and department defined their own key results aligned to the school’s priorities.
Identify one OKR Champion in each business unit and department. This mission was given to transversal project managers or new talents to promote the method within their BU or department, to ensure reviews and retrospectives are done, and to link with the OKR Lead and the Executive Committee.
“We identified one person in each BU and department to be my counterpart, to apply the method, to help leadership team members prepare reviews, and to make sure that reviews happen”, states Isabel.
Set up OKR reporting. The school adapted a tool they were already using for project management to track and report on OKR progress, giving the organization visibility into how things were moving.
Launch reviews. ESSEC introduced the principle of reviews, conducting one retrospective at the end of the first year.
Year 2: Simplification and Shared Ownership
The second year brought meaningful improvements driven by the lessons of Year 1.
Cutting key results in half. One of the boldest moves was the leadership team’s decision to reduce the number of objectives by 50% from Year 1 to Year 2. The push came from both the OKR Champions on the ground and the leadership team itself, who recognized the initial model as too complex and decided to sharpen its focus.
More shared key results. In Year 2, there were significantly more key results shared across departments and business units than in Year 1. This was a concrete step toward breaking internal silos.
“This method forces us to reach consistency and, as a consequence, to break internal silos. I think in any organization there are silos, but OKRs are a real lever to address them,” Isabel explains.
Empowering the OKR Champions network. Beyond Isabel, approximately 12 OKR Champions now operate throughout the organization, channeling feedback from teams back up to leadership and improving the process to adapt the method to the organization.
Two retrospectives per year. ESSEC moved from one annual retrospective to two per academic year, bringing the rhythm closer to a quarterly cadence adapted to the academic calendar (September to August).
Challenges Along the Way
ESSEC’s journey has not been without friction. Several challenges stood out:
Aligning on key results remains hard. Identifying tangible results is not the difficulty. The challenge lies in agreeing on which key results matter most.
Cross-functional action plans are still a work in progress. While shared key results between BUs and departments have increased, designing shared action plans across organizational boundaries remains the biggest challenge.
OKR Champions’ empowerment is uneven. Not all of them have the same level of seniority. For some, driving attention and action from senior leaders requires additional support.
“Not all OKR Champions within the organization have the same level of seniority. For some, it can be difficult to get the leadership team’s attention on what should be done or improved. It’s really a matter of empowering people to take on this role and drive things forward in their area of responsibility.”
Defining ambitious yet realistic targets. Like many organizations new to OKRs, ESSEC worked through the tension between setting ambitious key results and keeping them grounded in reality. As Isabel noted during a recent Comex retrospective: “It’s important to have ambitious key results, but they also need to be realistic.”
Leader conviction matters. In departments where leaders were convinced of the method, adoption moved faster.
The Role of Leadership
A consistent theme throughout ESSEC’s journey is the critical importance of top-down commitment.
“Like any method, especially when it comes to strategy monitoring, you have to lead by example. The first movement has to come from the leadership team. Empowerment has to start with the leadership team whose members are the primary ambassadors to their teams”, observes Isabel.
The OKR method at ESSEC works as a two-way street: it starts top-down with leadership setting direction and modeling behavior, but its real power emerges when it enables bottom-up feedback and ownership across the organization.
What’s Next
ESSEC’s immediate focus is on the next frontier of cross-functional collaboration. The goal is to ensure that when departments share a key result, they also design their action plans together, with full visibility and consistency.
“The next step is reinforcing the need to design action plans that are connected to shared OKRs, together. It’s really about breaking silos and making sure that when we design action plans, they are known and consistent from one department to another, because at the end, we are all working toward the same ambition.”
The school also continues to refine its review cadence, balancing the rhythm of academic years with the discipline OKRs require. And the work of empowering all OKR Champions to operate with confidence and authority in their respective areas continues.
Key Takeaways
ESSEC’s experience offers practical lessons for any organization considering OKRs, and especially for those in higher education, nonprofit, or mission-driven sectors:
- Train broadly, train early. ESSEC trained 150 managers in Year 1. This created a shared language and understanding across the organization that accelerated adoption.
- Start with leadership clarity. The executive committee set the direction first. Without clear top-level OKRs, department-level alignment is impossible.
- Simplify as you learn. ESSEC halved its key results in Year 2. Less really is more when it comes to focus.
- Build a Champion network. Having OKR Champions embedded in each business unit creates the connective tissue between strategy and execution.
- Expect the silo challenge. Shared key results are one thing. Shared action plans across departments are harder and take time. OKRs surface this challenge and provide the lever to address it.
- Adapt the cadence to your context. ESSEC works on academic years, not calendar quarters. They adapted the OKR rhythm accordingly, with annual key results and two retrospectives per year.
- Lead by example. Where leaders embrace the method, adoption accelerates. Where they don’t, it stalls. Leadership commitment is the single greatest accelerator.
If you are still wondering whether OKRs are only for startups and tech companies, ESSEC’s story is proof that the framework works just as well in academic and nonprofit organizations, provided there is discipline, focus, and leadership commitment.