Measure What Matters

by John Doerr

“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.” Together, the triumvirate brought a decisive ingredient for OKR success: conviction and buy-in at the top.

Grove was a scientific manager. He read everything in the budding fields of behavioral science and cognitive psychology.

to solve a management problem, he believed, was through “creative confrontation”—by facing people “bluntly, directly, and unapologetically.”

The essence of a healthy OKR culture—ruthless intellectual honesty, a disregard for self-interest, deep allegiance to the team—flowed

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.”

OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured.

While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable.

“Stretched goals,” as Grove called them, push organizations to new heights.

The OKR system, Grove wrote, “is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.”

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

In a crisis, you need a system that can drive transformation—quickly.

It gave management a tool for rapid implementation.

It is our choices … that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

When you’re the CEO or the founder of a company … you’ve got to say ‘This is what we’re doing,’

then you have to model it. Because if you don’t model it, no one’s going to do it.”

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

The one thing an [OKR] system should provide par excellence is focus. This can only happen if we keep the number of objectives small

“At any given time,” Aaron said, “some significant percentage of people are working on the wrong things. The challenge is knowing which ones.”

According to the Harvard Business Review, companies with highly aligned employees are more than twice as likely to be top performers.

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.

In 2001, the young Paul Buchheit initiated a 20 percent project with the code name Caribou. It’s now known as Gmail, the world’s leading web-based email service.

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.”

“The higher the goals, the higher the performance.” People who choose their destination will own a deeper awareness of what it takes to get there.

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

By loosening the reins and backing people to find their right answers, we help everybody win.

When goals are public and visible to all, a “team of teams” can attack trouble spots wherever they surface.

Daniel Pink, the author of Drive, agrees: “The single greatest motivator is ‘making progress in one’s work.’ The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged.”

Peter Drucker observed, “Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events. And without check-ins to reexamine the plan as events unfold, the executive has no way of knowing which events really matter and which are only noise.”

We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.”

That, my friends, is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Gmail didn’t merely improve on existing systems. It reinvented the category and forced competitors to raise their game by orders of magnitude. Such 10x thinking is rare in any sector,

The way Page sees it, a ten percent improvement means that you’re doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly. That’s why Page expects Googlers to create products and services that are ten times better than the competition.

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.

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

Andy Grove estimated that ninety minutes of a manager’s time “can enhance the quality of your subordinate’s work for two weeks.”

is mutual teaching and exchange of information. By talking about specific problems and situations, the supervisor teaches the subordinate his skills and know-how, and suggests ways to approach things. At the same time, the subordinate provides the supervisor with detailed information about what he is doing and what he is concerned about

It should be regarded as the subordinate’s meeting, with its agenda and tone set by him …. The supervisor is there to learn and coach.