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Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
“hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals.
Among experiments in the field, 90 percent confirm that productivity is enhanced by well-defined, challenging goals.
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. It moves us to strive for what might seem beyond our reach.
The best way to solve a management problem, he believed, was through “creative confrontation”—by
When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded.
OKR superpowers: focus, alignment, tracking, and stretching.
If the vectors point in different directions, they add up to zero. But if you get everybody pointing in the same direction, you maximize the results.
As Steve Jobs understood, “Innovation means saying no to one thousand things.”
I’ll never forget stepping into the bathroom of his tiny loft office and seeing a list of company objectives taped to the mirror, over the commode.
Print OKRs and put on visible place
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
top-down ecosystem, contributors will hesitate to share goal-related concerns or promising ideas.
Micromanagement is mismanagement.
People are led to stretch above and beyond, to set more ambitious targets and achieve more of those they set: “The higher the goals, the higher the performance.”
When our how is defined by others, the goal won’t engage us to the same degree.
In God we trust; all others must bring data. —W. Edwards Deming
The philosopher and educator John Dewey went a step further: “We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.”
The biggest risk of all is not taking one. —Mellody Hobson
OKRs push us far beyond our comfort zones. They lead us to achievements on the border between abilities and dreams.
As Bill Campbell liked to say: If companies “don’t continue to innovate, they’re going to die—and I didn’t say iterate, I said innovate.”
definition of entrepreneurs: Those who do more than anyone thinks possible … with less than anyone thinks possible.
