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

by John Doerr

Not least, they would need timely, relevant data. To track their progress. To measure what mattered.

I’d first used it in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where Andy Grove, the greatest manager of his or any era,

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.

Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. (And if it isn’t, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)

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

For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.

“hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.

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

The Santa Clara headquarters was an open expanse of low-walled cubicles, not yet a design cliché.

On state-of-the-art goal management platforms, OKR scores are system-generated; the numbers are objective, untouched by human hands. (With less automated, homegrown platforms, users may need to perform their own calculations.) The simplest, cleanest way to score an objective is by averaging the percentage completion rates of its associated key results. Google uses a scale of 0 to 1.0: 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.) Intel followed a similar formula.

Why is transparency important? Why would you want people across other departments to know your goals? And why does what we’re doing matter?

What is true accountability? What’s the difference between accountability with respect (for others’ failings) and accountability with vulnerability (for our own)?

How can OKRs help managers “get work done through others”? (That’s a big factor for scalability in a growing company.) How do we engage other teams to adopt our objective ...

When is it time to stretch a team’s workload—or to ease off on the throttle? When do you shift an objective to a different team member, or rewrite a goal to make it clearer, or remove it completely? In b...

Today’s transformed Lumeris values interdependence. It prizes intentional coordination. “OKRs make you focus on working on the business, instead of just working in the business,” says Jeff Smith, senior vice president for U.S. markets.

Smith was happily surprised to find the operations and delivery team tying their objectives directly to Smith’s sales goals. In the past, Smith said, “You’d hear things like, ‘I’m in delivery, you’re in sales, just do your damn job.’ Now it’s more like calling in a wide receiver to run a play: ‘I’m here, let me help you.’ That was a result of the OKR process I never expected.”