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

by John Doerr

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. —Yogi Berra

There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. —Andy Grove

Intuit CEO who later coached the Google executive team: “When you’re the CEO or the founder of a company . . . you’ve got to say ‘This is what we’re doing,’ and then you have to model it. Because if you don’t model it, no one’s going to do it.”

As Steve Jobs understood, “Innovation means saying no to one thousand things.” In most cases, the ideal number of quarterly OKRs will range between three and five.

We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.

In my view, you can only do one big thing at a time really well, and so you better know what that one thing is.

Everything seems important; everything seems urgent. But what really needs to get done?”

two nails are even slightly misaligned, a good hammer will splay them sideways.

When you come down to it, alignment is about helping people understand what you want them to do.