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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Doerr
Read between
January 12 - February 13, 2019
“hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.
But exactly how do you build engagement? 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.”
“When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.”
Many companies have a “rule of seven,” limiting managers to a maximum of seven direct reports. In some cases, Google has flipped the rule to a minimum of seven. (When Jonathan Rosenberg headed Google’s product team, he had as many as twenty.) The higher the ratio of reports, the flatter the org chart—which means less top-down oversight, greater frontline autonomy, and more fertile soil for the next breakthrough. OKRs help make all of these good things possible.
In November and December, each team and product area will develop its own plans for the coming year and distill them into OKRs.
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.” Hence the company’s slogan: “Intel delivers.” It almost doesn’t matter what you know. . . .
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
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They held that the most efficient and profitable organization was authoritarian.*
When people help choose a course of action, they are more likely to see it through.
Andy Grove’s quantum leap was to apply manufacturing production principles to the “soft professions,” the administrative, professional, and managerial ranks.
“create an environment that values and emphasizes output”
Grove wrestled with two riddles: How can we define and measure output by knowledge workers? And what can be done to increase it?
I had to hire a small team, guide my people’s work, and measure it against expectations.
Not one Intel product was modified for Crush. But Grove and his executive team altered the terms of engagement. They revamped their marketing to play to the company’s strengths. They steered their customers to see the value of long-term systems and services versus short-term ease of use. They stopped selling to programmers and started selling to CEOs.
“We will achieve a certain OBJECTIVE as measured by the following KEY RESULTS. . .
When you’re really high up in management, you’re teaching—that’s
As a division manager, I adopted any relevant company key results as my objectives.
“Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by 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. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting. As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner likes to say, “When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.”
Key Results Paired for Quantity and Quality
Remember that an OKR can be modified or even scrapped at any point in its cycle.
“Innovation means saying no to one thousand things.”
“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.”
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
Today, every employee in my department owns three to five business objectives per quarter, along with one or two personal ones.
Studies have told us forever that frontline employees thrive when they can see how their work aligns to the company’s overall goals.
“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.”
0.7 to 1.0 = green.* (We delivered.) 0.4 to 0.6 = yellow. (We made progress, but fell short of completion.) 0.0 to 0.3 = red. (We failed to make real progress.)
As a rule, we’d enter a quarter knowing we wouldn’t achieve all of them. If a department so much as approached 100 percent, it was presumed to be setting its sights too low—and there would be hell to pay.
In my view, the key to satisfaction is to set aggressive goals, achieve most of them, pause to reflect on the achievement, and then repeat the cycle.
Here are 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?
I see people confusing objectives with missions all the time. A mission is directional. An objective has a set of concrete steps that you’re intentionally engaged in and actually trying to go for.
The way Page sees it, a ten percent improvement means that you’re doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly. That’s why Page expects Googlers to create products and services that are ten times better than the competition. That means he isn’t satisfied with discovering a couple of hidden efficiencies or tweaking code to achieve modest gains. Thousand percent improvement requires rethinking problems, exploring what’s technically possible and having fun in the process.
How can your team create maximum value? What would amazing look like? If you seek to achieve greatness, stretching for amazing is a great place to start.
And the reward of having met one of these challenging goals is that you get to play again.
Engineers struggle with goal setting in two big ways. They hate crossing off anything they think is a good idea, and they habitually underestimate how long it takes to get things done.
He used a metaphor called the Big Rocks Theory, which was popularized by Stephen Covey.
Our true currency wasn’t views or clicks—it was watch time.
What is cc's currency? For Pro
A manager’s “first role,” Drucker said, “is the personal one. It’s the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence . . . the creation of a community.”
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?
When you hit a wall, you think, I’ll just work harder—that’s what got me here. What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop for a moment and shut out the noise. Close your eyes to really see what’s in front of you, and then pick the best way forward for you and your team, relative to the organization’s needs.
The agenda is you, the individual, and what you are trying to accomplish personally over the next two to three years, and how you’re breaking that into a two-week plan. I like to start with three questions: What makes you very happy? What saps your energy? How would you describe your dream job?
OKRs help me to be that focused, clear-headed leader. No matter how crazy things get, I can always default back to what matters.
I’m convinced that if structured goal setting and continuous communication were to be widely deployed, with rigor and imagination, we could see exponentially greater productivity and innovation throughout society.
If every key result happens on the last day of the quarter, you likely don’t have a real plan.
