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

by John Doerr

Crush illustrates all four OKR superpowers: focus, alignment, tracking, and stretching.

Crush, the purpose: To establish a sense of urgency and set in motion critical, corporate-wide decisions and action plans to address a life-threatening competitive challenge.

It is our choices . . . that show what we truly are, far

more than our abilities. —J. K. Rowling

Google turned to its mission statement: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

OKRs require a public commitment by leadership, in word and deed.

“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.”

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what.

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.”

Keep in mind, though, that it’s the shorter-term goals that drive the actual work. They keep annual plans honest—and executed.

In High Output Management, his leadership bible, Andy Grove notes: For the feedback to be effective, it must be received very soon after the activity it is measuring occurs. Accordingly, an [OKR] system should set objectives for a relatively short period. For example, if we plan on a yearly basis, the corresponding [OKR] time should be at least as often as quarterly or perhaps even monthly.

The more ambitious the OKR, the greater the risk of overlooking a vital criterion. To safeguard quality while pushing for quantitative deliverables, one solution is to pair key results—to measure “both effect and counter-effect,” as Grove wrote in High Output Management.

A few goal-setting ground rules: Key results should be succinct, specific, and measurable.

As Steve Jobs understood, “Innovation means saying no to one thousand things.”

At MyFitnessPal, the health and fitness app, “We were putting too much down,” says CEO Mike Lee. “There were too many things we were trying to get done, and then the prioritization wasn’t clear enough. So we decided to try to set fewer OKRs, and to make sure that the ones that really matter are the ones that we set.”

How does the new goal stack up against my existing ones?

In a high-functioning OKR system, top-down mandates to “just do more” are obsolete. Orders give way to questions, and to one question in particular: What matters most? When it came to goal setting, Andy Grove felt strongly that less is more: The one thing an [OKR] system should provide par excellence is focus. This can only happen if we keep the number of objectives small. . . . Each time you make a commitment, you forfeit your chance to commit to something else. This, of course, is an inevitable, inescapable consequence of allocating any finite resource. People who plan have to have the guts, honesty, and discipline to drop projects as well as to initiate them, to shake their heads “no” as well as to smile “yes.” . . . We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.

“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

In larger organizations, it’s common to find several people unwittingly working on the same thing. By clearing a line of sight to everyone’s objectives, OKRs expose redundant efforts and save time and money.

Once top-line objectives are set, the real work begins. As they shift from planning to execution, managers and contributors alike tie their day-to-day activities to the organization’s vision. The term for this linkage is alignment,

Having goals improves performance. Spending hours cascading goals up and down the company, however, does not.

The antithesis of cascading might be Google’s “20 percent time,” which frees engineers to work on side projects for the equivalent of one day per week.

Micromanagement is mismanagement.

When our how is defined by others, the goal won’t engage us to the same degree.

We created company OKRs for people instead of matching people to our OKRs—we had it backward.

MyFitnessPal mantra: When our customers succeed at reaching their health and fitness goals, we succeed as a company.

One underrated virtue of OKRs is that they can be tracked—and then revised or adapted as circumstances dictate.

For an OKR system to function effectively, the team deploying it—whether a group of top executives or an entire organization—must adopt it universally.

Daniel Pink, the author of Drive, agrees: “The single greatest motivator is ‘making progress in one’s work.’

OKRs don’t require daily tracking. But regular check-ins—preferably weekly—are essential to prevent slippage.

As we track and audit our OKRs, we have four options at any point in the cycle: Continue: If a green zone (“on track”) goal isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Update: Modify a yellow zone (“needs attention”) key result or objective to respond to changes in the workflow or external environment. What could be done differently to get the goal on track? Does it need a revised time line? Do we back-burner other initiatives to free up resources for this one? Start: Launch a new OKR mid-cycle, whenever the need arises. Stop: When a red zone (“at risk”) goal has outlived its usefulness, the best solution may be to drop it.*

One proviso: When an objective gets dropped before the end of the OKR interval, it’s important to notify everyone depending on it. Then comes reflection: What did I learn that I didn’t foresee at the beginning of the quarter? And: How will I apply this lesson in the future?

In both one-on-ones and team meetings, these wrap-ups consist of three parts: objective scoring, subjective self-assessment, and reflection.

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.)

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?

After thoroughly appraising your work and owning up to any shortfalls, take a breath to savor your progress. Throw a party with the team to celebrate your growing OKR superpowers. You’ve earned it.