Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

by John Doerr

“hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.

OKRs were an elastic, data-driven apparatus for a freewheeling, data-worshipping enterprise.*

to avoid what Drucker termed the “activity trap”: “[S]tressing output is the key to increasing productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”