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

by John Doerr

“A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.” 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. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution. 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. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not

OKRs surface your primary goals. They channel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.

Excellent point

Among experiments in the field, 90 percent confirm that productivity is enhanced by well-defined, challenging goals.

Goal note

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.”

Engagement

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.

four OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch.

annual performance reviews have sparked a robust alternative—continuous performance management. I will introduce OKRs’ younger sibling, CFRs (Conversation, Feedback, Recognition), and show how OKRs and CFRs can team up to lift leaders, contributors, and organizations to a whole new level.

Alternative performance review