Measure What Matters

by John Doerr

May everyone have a Bill Campbell in their lives—or even strive to make themselves be a bit more like the Coach!

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.

Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

defined OKRs: “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.

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.

“It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”)

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.

More highly engaged work groups generate more profit and less attrition.

Goal setting isn’t bulletproof: “When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.” An effective goal management system—an OKR system—links goals to a team’s broader mission. It respects targets and deadlines while adapting to circumstances. It promotes feedback and celebrates wins, large and small. Most important, it expands our limits.

If this book were an OKR, I’d call its objective aspirational: to make people’s lives, your life, more fulfilling.

There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.

“Intel delivers.”

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 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.

“John, venture capital, that’s not a real job. It’s like being a real estate agent.”

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.

“Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner likes to say, “When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.”

A three-month horizon curbs procrastination and leads to real performance gains.

To safeguard quality while pushing for quantitative deliverables, one solution is to pair key results—to measure “both effect and counter-effect,”

Key results should be succinct, specific, and measurable. A mix of outputs and inputs is helpful. Finally, completion of all key results must result in attainment of the objective.

In most cases, the ideal number of quarterly OKRs will range between three and five.

By definition, start-ups wrestle with ambiguity.

The hairier the mission, the more important your OKRs.

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

“some significant percentage of people are working on the wrong things. The challenge is knowing which ones.”

Research shows that public goals are more likely to be attained than goals held in private. Simply flipping the switch to “open” lifts achievement across the board. In a recent survey of one thousand working U.S. adults, 92 percent said they’d be more motivated to reach their goals if colleagues could see their progress.

Studies suggest that only 7 percent of employees “fully understand their company’s business strategies and what’s expected of them in order to help achieve the common goals.”

“Okay, now I see where we’re going, and I’ll adapt my goals to that.”

“My objective is directly a key result of my manager’s OKR, which ties directly to the top-level EBS objective, which ties to the company’s shift to the cloud. Now I understand how what I’m doing in India connects to the company mission.”

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

In the meantime, please do your OKRs on time, grade your previous quarter’s OKRs, do a good job at it, and post them so that the OKR link from your moma [intranet] page works. This is not administrative busywork, it’s an important way to set your priorities for the quarter and ensure that we’re all working together.

The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged.”

people who recorded their goals and sent weekly progress reports to a friend attained 43 percent more of their objectives than those who merely thought about goals without sharing them.

Google’s benchmark check-in cycle is monthly, at a minimum,

Google uses a scale of 0 to 1.0: • 0.7 to 1.0 = green.fn2 (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.)

If a department so much as approached 100 percent, it was presumed to be setting its sights too low—and there would be hell to pay.

the key to satisfaction is to set aggressive goals, achieve most of them, pause to reflect on the achievement, and then repeat the cycle.

Focus and commitment are a must for targeting goals that make a real difference. Only a transparent, collaborative, aligned, and connected organization can achieve so far beyond the norm. And without quantifiable tracking, how can you know when you’ve reached that amazing stretch objective?

Google divides its OKRs into two categories, committed goals and aspirational (or “stretch”) goals.

aspirational OKRs are set at 60 to 70 percent attainment. In other words, performance is expected to fall short at least 30 percent of the time. And that’s considered success!

Leaders must convey two things: the importance of the outcome, and the belief that it’s attainable.

You know, in our business we have to set ourselves uncomfortably tough objectives, and then we have to meet them. And then after ten milliseconds of celebration we have to set ourselves another [set of] highly difficult-to-reach objectives and we have to meet them. And the reward of having met one of these challenging goals is that you get to play again.

“If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.”

He wanted people at Google to be “uncomfortably excited.” He wanted us to have “a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

“No, we didn’t reach the goal, but we are laying the foundation to break through this barrier. Now, what are we going to do differently?”

OKRs require organization. You need a leader to embrace the process and a lieutenant to ride herd over scoring and reviews.

This is the direction we want to go, now tell us how you’re going to get there.

no team goes into an OKR saying, “Let’s settle for 70 percent and call it a success.” Everyone tries to get to 100 percent, especially once an objective seems within reach.