Measure What Matters by John Doerr

• As much as I hate process, good ideas with great execution are how you make magic. And that’s where OKRs come in.
• Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
• The practice that molded me at Intel and saved me at Sun--that still inspires me today--is called OKRs. Short for Objectives and Key Results. It is a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. Now, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They cannot substitute for sound judgement, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop.
• An Objective 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 all, they are measurable and verifiable. You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt.
• Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved.
• OKRs surface your primary goals. They cannel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.
• For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.
• In the technology sector, two out of three employees think they could find a better job inside of two months.
• 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 importantly, it expands our limits. It moves us to strive for what might seem beyond our reach.
• 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. OKRs help make all of these good things possible.
• High-performance organizations home in on work that’s important, and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter. OKRs impel leaders to make hard choices. They’re a precision communication tool for departments, teams, and individual contributors. By dispelling confusion, OKRs give us the focus needed to win.
• Andy Grove’s quantum leap was to apply manufacturing production principles to the “soft professions,” the administrative, professional, and managerial ranks. He sought to “create an environment that values and emphasizes output” and to avoid what Drucker termed the “activity trap”.
• On an assembly line, it’s easy enough to distinguish output from activity. It gets trickier when employees are paid to think.
• “Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
• An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.
• Leaders must get across the why as well as the what.
• Don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
• Remember that an OKR can be modified or even scrapped at any point in its cycle.
• Sometimes the “right” key results surface weeks or months after a goal is put into play. OKRs are inherently works in progress, not commandments chiseled in stone.
• A few goal-setting ground rules: key results should be succinct, specific, and measurable.
• As Steve Jobs understood, “Innovation means saying no to one thousand things.”
• In most cases, the ideal number of quarterly OKRs will range between three and five.
• Too many objectives can blur our focus on what counts, or distracts us into chasing the next shiny thing.
• We learned the three watchwords for entrepreneurs:
• Solve a problem
• Build a simple product
• Talk to your users
• Research shows that public goals are more likely to be attained than goals held in private.
• One underrated virtua of OKRs is that they can be tracked--and then revised or adapted as circumstances dictate.
• Annual performance reviews are costly, exhausting, and mostly futile.
• In short, we need a new HR model for the new world of work. That transformational system, the contemporary alternative to annual reviews, is continuous performance management.
• It is implemented with an instrument called CFRs, for:
• Conversations: an authentic, richly textured exchange between manager and contributor, aimed at driving performance.
• Feedback: bidirectional or networked communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide future improvement.
• Recognition: expressions of appreciation to deserving individuals for contributors of all sizes.
• For companies moving to continuous performance management, the first step is blunt and straightforward: divorce compensation (both raises and bonuses) from OKRs. These should be two distinct conversations, with their own cadences and calendars.
• Feedback can be highly constructive--but only if it is specific.
• Continuous recognition is a powerful driver of engagement.
• Recognize people for actions and results.
• Corrective feedback is naturally difficult for people. But when done well, it’s also the greatest gift you can give to someone--because it can change people's mindset and modify their behavior in the most positive, valuable way.
• People watch what you do more than what you say.
• Ideas are easy; execution is everything.
• Poorly done/managed OKRs are a waste of time, an empty management gesture. Well done OKRs are a motivational management tool that helps make it clear to teams what’s important, what to optimize, and what tradeoffs to make during their day-to-day work.
• Objectives are the “Whats”. They:
• Express goals and intents.
• Are aggressive yet realistic.
• Must be tangible, objective, and unambiguous; should be obvious to a rational observer whether an objective has been achieved.
• The successful achievement of an objective must provide clear value for Google.
• Key results are the “Hows”. They:
• Express measurable milestones which, if achieved, will advance objectives in a useful manner to their constituents.
• Must describe outcomes, not activities.
• Must include evidence of completion.
• OKRs have two variants, and it is important to differentiate between them: commitment OKRs and aspirational OKRs.
• OKRs are often written principally based on what the team believes it can achieve without changing anything they’re currently doing, as opposed to what the team or its customers really want.
• If your objective doesn’t fit on one line, it probably isn’t crisp enough.
• Four superpowers of OKRs:
• Focus and commit to priorities.
• Align and connect for teamwork.
• Track for accountability.
• Stretch for amazing.
• Too many OKRs dilute and scatter people’s efforts.
• Expand your effective capacity by deciding what not to do, and discard, defer, or deemphasize accordingly.
• In choosing OKRs, look for objectives with the most leverage for outstanding performance.
• When leaders openly admit their missteps, contributors feel freer to take healthy risks.
• Establish an environment where individuals are free to fail without judgement.
• To get leaps in productivity or innovation, follow Google’s “Gospel of 10x” and replace incremental OKRs with exponential ones. That’s how industries get disrupted and categories reinvented.