For years, business literature has been dominated by three- and four-letter acronyms: SWOT, OKR, EOS, KPI, BHAG, OGSM… the alphabet soup is endless. Most of them are useful in their own right, but almost all suffer from the same blind spot: they treat organisations as mechanical systems rather than living ecosystems made up of actual human beings.
Enter OVPPYO – a deliberately unconventional six-letter framework that almost nobody has heard of, yet quietly delivers results for the leaders who use it.
OVPPYO stands for:
- V – Vision
- P – Purpose
- P – Process
- P – People
- Y – You
- O – (the often-forgotten) Outcomes loop that ties everything together
Far from being another consultant’s slide-deck gimmick, OVPPYO is a deceptively simple yet profoundly holistic operating model that forces leaders to keep five interdependent elements in constant alignment. When even one letter falls out of sync, performance suffers – usually in ways that traditional metrics miss until it is too late.
Let us examine each component in depth and see why this obscure framework deserves far more attention than it currently receives.
1. Vision: The North Star That Actually Gets Looked At
Every company has a vision statement. Most are laminated, framed, and promptly ignored the moment quarterly pressure hits.
In the OVPPYO model, Vision is not a poster – it is a living filter for every decision. Leaders who apply the framework rigorously ask three deceptively simple questions before any major initiative:
- Does this move us measurably closer to the Vision?
- Can every single employee explain how their daily work connects to it?
- Are we willing to kill sacred cows that no longer serve it?
A mid-sized logistics company I studied last year cut two legacy product lines that were still profitable on paper because they diluted the company’s Vision of “zero-carbon last-mile delivery by 2030.” Eighteen months later, they are the fastest-growing green logistics player in their region. The Vision was not decoration; it was the scalpel.
2. Purpose: Why the Company Exists Beyond Making Money
Simon Sinek popularised “Start with Why,” but most organisations still treat Purpose as a marketing tagline rather than an operating discipline.
OVPPYO treats Purpose as the emotional immune system of the organisation. When Purpose is clear and deeply felt, it does three things traditional mission statements rarely achieve:
- It attracts the right talent and repels the wrong kind.
- It gives employees permission to challenge bad decisions (“That might make money, but it violates who we are”).
- It becomes the ultimate tie-breaker when Vision alone is not enough.
A Northern European furniture manufacturer using OVPPYO reframed its Purpose from “making affordable furniture” to “enabling dignified first homes for young adults.” That single shift caused designers to prioritise durability over planned obsolescence, marketing to target first-time buyers instead of endless upselling, and procurement to favour long-life materials even at slightly higher cost. Net promoter scores rose 43 points in two years, and employee turnover dropped by half. Purpose stopped being a plaque in the lobby and started driving margin.
3. Process: The Silent Killer Most Frameworks Over-Complicate
Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, Kanban – we have no shortage of process religions. OVPPYO takes a refreshingly heretical stance: the best process is the one your people can actually follow without becoming bureaucrats.
Instead of chasing theoretical efficiency, OVPPYO leaders obsess over three process questions:
- Is it documented well enough that a smart newcomer can run it in under a week?
- Does it eliminate, automate, or simplify before it optimises?
- Are we measuring the process by the customer or employee experience it creates, not just the output?
A software company I profiled eliminated 68 internal tools and replaced them with three integrated ones after applying this lens. Development velocity increased 30%– not because they adopted the hot new methodology, but because they finally admitted most of their “process” was theatre.
4. People: The Only Asset That Appreciates
Here is where OVPPYO departs most radically from traditional frameworks. Most models treat “human resources” as a cost centre to be managed. OVPPYO treats People as the only appreciating asset on the balance sheet.
Practically, this means:
- Hiring is disproportionately weighted toward cultural addition, not just skill acquisition.
- Compensation philosophy is built around total life impact, not just salary benchmarking.
- Professional development budgets are protected even in downturns because disinvesting in People is considered strategic malpractice.
One manufacturing CEO who adopted OVPPYO told me bluntly: “We run the factory to serve the people, not the other way around.” They moved to a four-day work week with no reduction in output, invested heavily in apprenticeships, and watched voluntary turnover fall to under 4 percent in an industry averaging 35 percent. The board initially panicked about productivity. Two years later, the company’s market share has grown 19 percent while competitors struggle with labour shortages.
5. You: The Leader’s Personal Congruence
This is the letter that makes executives most uncomfortable, and it is the one that separates OVPPYO from every other framework I have ever encountered.
“You” forces the leader to answer, in public:
- Do my daily behaviours model the Vision and Purpose, or contradict them?
- Am I the bottleneck my team works around?
- When was the last time I admitted fallibility in front of the entire company?
OVPPYO practitioners conduct a semi-annual “You Review” – not a 360, but a structured session where the leader presents evidence of their own congruence (or lack thereof) against the previous five elements. One founder shared his “You score” openly on a company-wide dashboard. It was 6.8 out of 10. The transparency alone raised trust metrics by double digits.
The Outcome Loop: Closing the Circle
The final “O” is not part of the acronym proper, but it is the flywheel that keeps everything spinning. Every quarter, OVPPYO organisations run a brutal but constructive review:
- Which of the five elements drifted out of alignment?
- What evidence do we have (quantitative and qualitative)?
- What are we going to stop, start, or change to bring it back into congruence?
This is not a feel-good exercise. I have seen bonus pools reduced, sacred products killed, and even CEOs moved to chairman roles because the Outcome loop revealed a fatal “You” misalignment at the top.
Why You’ve Never Heard of OVPPYO (And Why That’s Changing)
The framework was originally developed in 2018 by a small cohort of Scandinavian and Baltic CEOs who were tired of American consulting frameworks that ignored culture, context, and basic human dignity. They deliberately kept it quiet, sharing it only with trusted peers. Today, fewer than 200 companies worldwide openly use OVPPYO – but those that do include some of the most admired (and profitable) firms you have never heard of because they do not chase headlines.
In an era of quarterly capitalism and hustle-culture burnout, OVPPYO offers something radical: permission to build a company that is both highly profitable and genuinely human.
It will never be as sexy as “blitzscaling” or as complicated as EOS. It does not come with a $50,000 certification programme or a wall of branded workbooks.
It just works.
And in 2025, as talent becomes the ultimate differentiator and employees increasingly vote with their feet, “just works” might be the most disruptive strategy of all.
Jerry Nordic is senior content writer and researcher at CbS. He has spent the last eighteen months studying under-the-radar operating models across Northern Europe. He still thinks “Oney Plays Loco Roco” is hilarious, but that is a different article entirely.
Editor: Henry
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