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by
John Doerr
Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
“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 a...
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“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.” Goal setting isn’t bulletproof: “When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.”
“Google’s objective is to be the systematic innovator of scale. Innovator means new stuff. And scale means big, systematic ways of looking at things done in a way that’s reproducible.”
In Google’s early years, Larry Page set aside two days per quarter to personally scrutinize the OKRs for each and every software engineer. (I’d sit in on some of those reviews, and Larry’s analytical legerdemain—his preternatural ability to find coherence in so many moving parts—was unforgettable.) As the company expanded, Larry continued to kick off each quarter with a marathon debate on his leadership team’s objectives.
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.
He discerned a basic truth of human nature: When people help choose a course of action, they are more likely to see it through.
“Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
“When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.”
The “professional employee,” Peter Drucker wrote, “needs rigorous performance standards and high goals. . . . But how he does his work should always be his responsibility and his decision.” At Intel, Grove took a dim view of “managerial meddling”: “[T]he subordinate will begin to take a much more restricted view of what is expected of him, showing less initiative in solving his own problems and referring them instead to his [or her] supervisor. . . . [T]he output of the organization will consequently be reduced. . . .”
By loosening the reins and backing people to find their right answers, we help everybody win.
Google divides its OKRs into two categories, committed goals and aspirational (or “stretch”) goals. It’s a distinction with a real difference. Committed objectives are tied to Google’s metrics: product releases, bookings, hiring, customers. Management sets them at the company level, employees at the departmental level. In general, these committed objectives—such as sales and revenue goals—are to be achieved in full (100 percent) within a set time frame. Aspirational objectives reflect bigger-picture, higher-risk, more future-tilting ideas. They originate from any tier and aim to mobilize the
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To succeed, a stretch goal cannot seem like a long march to nowhere. Nor can it be imposed from on high without regard to realities on the ground. Stretch your team too fast and too far, and it may snap. In pursuing high-effort, high-risk goals, employee commitment is essential. Leaders must convey two things: the importance of the outcome, and the belief that it’s attainable.
He used a metaphor called the Big Rocks Theory, which was popularized by Stephen Covey. Say you have some rocks, and a bunch of pebbles, and some sand, and your goal is to fit as much of everything as you can into a wide-mouth, one-gallon jar. If you start with the sand, and then the pebbles, the jar will run out of room for all the rocks. But when you start with the rocks, add the pebbles, and save the sand for last, the sand fills the spaces between the rocks—everything fits.
“If a conversation is limited to whether you achieved the goal or not, you lose context. You need continuous performance management to surface the critical questions: Was the goal harder to achieve than you’d thought when you set it? Was it the right goal in the first place? Is it motivating? Should we double down on the two or three things that really worked for us last quarter, or is it time to consider a pivot? You need to elicit those insights from all over the organization.
These organizations don’t merely engage their workers. They inspire them. They replace rules with shared principles; carrots and sticks are supplanted by a common sense of purpose. They are built around trust, which enables risk taking, which spurs innovation, which drives performance and productivity.
For committed OKRs Teams are expected to rearrange their other priorities to ensure an on-schedule 1.0 delivery. Teams who cannot credibly promise to deliver a 1.0 on a committed OKR must escalate promptly. This is a key point: Escalating in this (common) situation is not only OK, it is required.
