Measure What Matters Quotes

“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with 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”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Early on in your career, when you’re an individual contributor, you’re graded on the volume and quality of your work. Then one day, all of a sudden, you’re a manager. Let’s assume you do well and move up to manage more and more people. Now you’re no longer paid for the amount of work you do; you’re paid for the quality of decisions you make.”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters

“Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Then come the four OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch.”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“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?”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“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.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Meritocracy flourishes in sunlight.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“As Jim Collins observes in Good to Great, first you need to get “the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Only then do you turn the wheel and step on the gas.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“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. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”)”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Contributors are most engaged when they can actually see how their work contributes to the company’s success. Quarter to quarter, day to day, they look for tangible measures of their achievement. Extrinsic rewards—the year-end bonus check—merely validate what they already know. OKRs speak to something more powerful, the intrinsic value of the work itself.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“It almost doesn’t matter what you know. It’s what you can do with whatever you know or can acquire and actually accomplish [that] tends to be valued here.” Hence the company’s slogan: “Intel delivers.”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“If the heart doesn't find a perfect rhyme with the head, then your passion means nothing.

The OKR framework cultivates the madness, the chemistry contained inside. It gives us an environment for risk, for trust, where falling is not a fireable offense- you know, a safe place to be yourself.

And when you have that sort of structure and environment, and the right people, magic is around the corner.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Or as Larry Page would say, winning organizations need to “put more wood behind fewer arrows.”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters

“If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“OKRs are big, not incremental—we don’t expect to hit all of them. (If we do, we’re not setting them aggressively enough.) We grade them with a color scale to measure how well we did: 0.0–0.3 is red 0.4–0.6 is yellow 0.7–1.0 is green”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Acute focus, open sharing, exacting measurement, a license to shoot for the moon—these are the hallmarks of modern goal science.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“For a service business, nothing is more valuable than engaged employees who feel they can make a difference and want to stay with the organization. Turnover is costly. The best turnover is internal turnover, where people are growing their careers within your enterprise rather than moving someplace else. People aren’t wired to be nomads. They just need to find a place where they feel they can make a real impact.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Stretch goals can be crushing if people don’t believe they’re achievable.”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. —Andy Grove”
― John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“(Wrong decisions can be corrected once results begin to roll in. Nondecisions—or hastily abandoned ones—teach us nothing.)”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

“Encourage a healthy proportion of bottom-up OKRs—roughly half. Smash departmental silos by connecting teams with horizontally shared OKRs. Cross-functional operations enable quick and coordinated decisions, the basis for seizing a competitive advantage. Make all lateral, cross-functional dependencies explicit.”
― John E. Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs