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

by John Doerr

Now, the two key phrases . . . are objectives and the key result. And they match the two purposes. The objective is the direction: “We want to dominate the mid-range microcomputer component business.” That’s an objective. That’s where we’re going to go. Key results for this quarter: “Win ten new designs for the 8085” is one key result. It’s a milestone. The two are not the same. . . . The key result has to be measurable. But at the end you can look, and without any arguments: Did I do that or did I not do it? Yes? No? Simple. No judgments in it. Now, did we dominate the mid-range microcomputer business? That’s for us to argue in the years to come, but over the next quarter we’ll know whether we’ve won ten new designs or not. It was a “very, very simple system,” Grove said, knowing simplicity was catnip to an audience of engineers. On its face, the conception seemed logical, commonsensical—and inspiring. Against the stale management orthodoxy of the period, Grove had created something fresh and original.

At Intel, Andy recruited “aggressive introverts” in his own image, people who solved problems quickly, objectively, systematically, and permanently.

By then he was the company’s president, and he said, “Come on, Doerr, don’t you want to be a general manager and own a real P&L? I’ll let you run Intel’s software division.” It was a nonexistent business, but could have been built into one. Then he added a zinger: “John, venture capital, that’s not a real job. It’s like being a real estate agent.”

tool, not a weapon. The OKR system, Grove wrote, “is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.” To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate.

all four OKR superpowers: focus, alignment, tracking, and stretching.

“Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

Too many CEOs share the frustration of Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box, the enterprise cloud company. “At any given time,” Aaron said, “some significant percentage of people are working on the wrong things. The challenge is knowing which ones.”

High-functioning teams thrive on a creative tension between top-down and bottom-up goal setting, a mix of aligned and unaligned OKRs.

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.”

some reflections for closing out an OKR cycle: 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?

Albert Einstein observed, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

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.