Measure What Matters | How Google, Bono, And The Gates Foundation Rock The World With OKRs by John Doerr

I. Brief Summary

OKRs have been a better part of my entire professional journey but the framework rarely got implemented the way it was intended to. This is why OKRs are disliked today because of lost context. I disliked them too until I read this book. If the framework is employed correctly from top to bottom the entire organization can move mountains. This book is based on late Andy Grove's managerial foundation who led Intel. John Doerr is the father of OKR who is responsible for bringing OKRs to Google and the world. He saw before anyone else the transformative power Andy Grove's system from Intel could have at Google, and this book is a great window into how OKRs are implemented. It is a powerful goal-setting framework for organizations.

II. Big Ideas

• Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
• Influential leaders like Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Bono praise OKR for its effective goal-setting system.
  • Bill Gates (Microsoft) has praised the OKR system for its ability to align teams and drive focus.
  • Larry Page (Google) has implemented OKRs to encourage ambitious goals and foster a culture of accountability.
  • Bono (lead singer of U2) has used OKRs to drive social impact through his organization, ONE.
• OKRs: Objective, Key, and Results
  • OKRs help your organization prioritize the highest impact initiatives.
  • OKRs are a shared language for execution. They clarify expectations: What do we need to get done (and fast), and who’s working on it? They keep employees aligned, vertically and horizontally.
  • Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization. OKRs surface your primary goals. They channel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.
    • Objective: a short, inspirational, and achievable statement that describes WHAT you want to achieve. Objectives are a “vaccine against fuzzy thinking and fuzzy execution.”
      • An O, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less.
      • By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational.
    • Key Results: succinct, specific, and measurable actions that map out HOW you will achieve your Objectives. KRs are aggressive, but realistic.
      • KRs benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective.
      • Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic.
      • Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. It’s not a key result unless it has a number.
  • Goals need to be intentional. If not done right, goals may cause systematic problems in organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased motivation. The wrong goals can be detrimental to an organization.
  • Get both executors and management involved. People who choose their destination will own a deeper awareness of what it takes to get there. Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers.
  • OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch
    • Focus the organization on what matters
    • Allow us to measure progress towards our goals
    • Create alignment in groups
    • Allow us to stretch to achieve things we wouldn’t have thought possible
  • OKRs are big, not incremental—don’t expect to hit all of them. (If you are, you are not setting them aggressively enough.)
    • Grade them with a color scale to measure how well you did (how google does it):
      • 0.0–0.3 is red
      • 0.4–0.6 is yellow
      • 0.7–1.0 is green
• CFRs: Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition
  • CFRs help promote transparency, accountability, empowerment, and teamwork.
    • Conversations: an authentic, richly textured exchange between manager and contributor, aimed at driving performance.
    • Feedback: bidirectional or networked communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide future improvement
    • Recognition: expressions of appreciation to deserving individuals for contributions of all
  • Divorce compensation (both raises and bonuses) from OKRs. These should be two distinct conversations, with their own cadences and calendars. The first is a backward-looking assessment, typically held at year’s end. The second is an ongoing, forward-looking dialogue between leaders and contributors. It centers on five questions: What are you working on? How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along? Is there anything impeding your work? What do you need from me to be (more) successful? How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?
• Culture
  • Structure and clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear? - Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
  • Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
  • Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?
  • Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
• Questions to ask
  • Did I accomplish all of my objectives?
    • If so, what contributed to my success?
    • If not, what obstacles did I encounter?
  • If I were to rewrite a goal achieved in full, what would I change?
  • What have I learned that might alter my approach to the next cycle’s OKRs?

III. Quotes

• There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.
• Then come the four OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch.
• OKRs surface your primary goals. They channel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.
• An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.
• A two-year Deloitte study found that no single factor has more impact than “clearly defined goals that are written down and shared freely....Goals create alignment, clarity, and job satisfaction.
• We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.
• It almost doesn’t matter what you know. It’s what you can do with whatever you know or can acquire and actually accomplish [that] tends to be valued here.
• When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.
• For a service business, nothing is more valuable than engaged employees who feel they can make a difference and want to stay with the organization. Turnover is costly. The best turnover is internal turnover, where people are growing their careers within your enterprise rather than moving someplace else. People aren’t wired to be nomads. They just need to find a place where they feel they can make a real impact.
• Contributors are most engaged when they can actually see how their work contributes to the company’s success. Quarter to quarter, day to day, they look for tangible measures of their achievement. Extrinsic rewards—the year-end bonus check—merely validate what they already know. OKRs speak to something more powerful, the intrinsic value of the work itself.
• You can tell people to clean up a mess, but should you be telling them which broom to use? When top management was saying “We’ve got to crush Motorola!” somebody at the bottom might have said “Our benchmarks are lousy; I think I’ll write some better benchmarks.” That was how we worked.
• Early on in your career, when you’re an individual contributor, you’re graded on the volume and quality of your work. Then one day, all of a sudden, you’re a manager. Let’s assume you do well and move up to manage more and more people. Now you’re no longer paid for the amount of work you do; you’re paid for the quality of decisions you make.
• The art of management,” Grove wrote, “lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.
• Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission.
• Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.
• We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. — Steve Jobs
• As Jim Collins observes in Good to Great, first you need to get “the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Only then do you turn the wheel and step on the gas.
• Meritocracy flourishes in sunlight.
• We do not learn from experience....we learn from reflecting on experience.
• If the heart doesn't find a perfect rhyme with the head, then your passion means nothing.
• The OKR framework cultivates the madness, the chemistry contained inside. It gives us an environment for risk, for trust, where falling is not a fireable offense- you know, a safe place to be yourself. And when you have that sort of structure and environment, and the right people, magic is around the corner.
• Acute focus, open sharing, exacting measurement, a license to shoot for the moon—these are the hallmarks of modern goal science.
• Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.
• Stretch goals can be crushing if people don’t believe they’re achievable.
• If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable. — Larry Page
• For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.
• Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
• People are the most important thing that we do. We have to try to make them better.
• If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster. — Stephen Covey
• Actions—and data—speak louder than words.
• Individuals want to drive their own success. They don’t want to wait till the end of the year to be graded. They want to know how they’re doing while they’re doing it, and also what they need to do differently.
• The single greatest motivator is ‘making progress in one’s work.’ The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged. — Daniel Pink
• Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others. — Sheryl Sandberg
• As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”