More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Doerr
Read between
January 18 - January 21, 2024
Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
An OBJECTIVE, I explained, 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 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.
OKRs surface your primary goals. They channel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.
Edwin Locke, “hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.
four OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch.
OKRs’ younger sibling, CFRs (Conversation, Feedback, Recognition),
venture capital, that’s not a real job. It’s like being a real estate agent.”
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. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded.
To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate.
OKR can be modified or even scrapped at any point in its cycle.
completion of all key results must result in attainment of the objective. If not, it’s not an OKR.
Success in college is a matter of time management.
“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.”
As Stephen Covey noted, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
Whenever a key result or objective becomes obsolete or impractical, feel free to end it midstream.
The philosopher and educator John Dewey went a step further: “We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.”
We borrowed from Jim Collins: “What can you be the best at in the world?”
“uncomfortably excited.”
“a healthy disregard for the impossible.”
“What the hell, can you hurry up and get this done? I’ve been waiting forever!” When you say instead, “My KR is at risk,” it’s less charged and more constructive. Since our company has total alignment, the entire team has already agreed to the key result and the dependency it entails. There’s no judgment, just a problem to be solved.
“What we choose to measure is a window into our values, and into what we value,” Dov says. “Because if you measure something, you’re telling people that it matters.”
aspirational OKRs express how we’d like the world to look, even though we have no clear idea how to get there and/or the resources necessary to deliver the OKR.
