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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Doerr
Read between
June 17 - July 9, 2018
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. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”) You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt.
For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.
First, said 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.
Among experiments in the field, 90 percent confirm that productivity is enhanced by well-defined, challenging goals.
whatmatters.com—is
Then come the four OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch.
High-performance organizations home in on work that’s important, and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter. OKRs impel leaders to make hard choices.
With OKR transparency, everyone’s goals—from the CEO down—are openly shared.
OKRs are driven by data. They are animated by periodic check-ins, objective grading, and continuous reassessment—all in a spirit of no-judgment accountability.
OKRs motivate us to excel by doing more than we’d thought possible.
There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. —Andy Grove
Grove’s title was executive vice president; he would wait twelve more years to succeed Gordon Moore as CEO. But Andy was Intel’s communicator, its operator par excellence, its taskmaster-in-chief. Everybody knew he was in charge.
“Expertise was very much valued there,” Andy explained. “That is why people got hired. That’s why people got promoted. Their effectiveness at translating that knowledge into actual results was kind of shrugged off.” At Intel, he went on, “we tend to be exactly the opposite. 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.”
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. .
A corporation, he wrote, should be a community “built on trust and respect for the workers—not just a profit machine.” Further, he urged that subordinates be consulted on company goals.
When people help choose a course of action, they are more likely to see it through.
He sought to “create an environment that values and emphasizes output” and to avoid what Drucker termed the “activity trap”: “[S]tressing output is the key to increasing productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”
Fabricating semiconductors is a tough business. Without rigor, nothing works; yields plummet, chips fail. OKRs were constant reminders of what our teams needed to be doing. They told us precisely what we were achieving—or not.
Though he wasn’t demonstrative, Grove could be a compassionate leader. When he saw a manager failing, he would try to find another role—perhaps at a lower level—where the person might succeed and regain some standing and respect.
The best way to solve a management problem, he believed, was through “creative confrontation”—by facing people “bluntly, directly, and unapologetically.”
he was down-to-earth and approachable, open to any good idea.
you’ll succeed or fail in this business based on whether your team makes their numbers.”
I developed more discipline, more constancy.
Andy Grove was a rare hybrid, a supreme technologist and the greatest chief executive of his day.
Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.” A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most.
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.
No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. Collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement.
Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle.
Dare to fail. “Output will tend to be greater,” Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. . . . Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.” While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable.
As Grove told his iOPEC students, Intel “stumbled a lot of times” after adopting OKRs: “We didn’t fully understand the principal purpose of it. And we are kind of doing better with it as time goes on.” An organization may need up to four or five quarterly cycles to fully embrace the system, and even more than that to build mature goal muscle.
