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Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Then come the four OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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?
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.”)
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Stretch goals can be crushing if people don’t believe they’re achievable.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. —Andy Grove
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters)
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When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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If an objective is well framed, three to five KRs will usually be adequate to reach it.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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People are the most important thing that we do. We have to try to make them better.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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(Wrong decisions can be corrected once results begin to roll in. Nondecisions—or hastily abandoned ones—teach us nothing.)
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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as Larry Page says, “If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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He wanted people at Google to be “uncomfortably excited.” He wanted us to have “a healthy disregard for the impossible.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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The best way to solve a management problem, he believed, was through “creative confrontation”—by facing people “bluntly, directly, and unapologetically.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Peak performance is the product of collaboration and accountability.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Actions—and data—speak louder than words.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Voltaire: Don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.* Remember
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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So I’d come to a philosophy, my mantra: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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KEY RESULTS (AS MEASURED BY . . .) Deliver five benchmarks. Develop a demo. Develop sales training materials for the field force. Call on three customers to prove the material works.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Individuals want to drive their own success. They don’t want to wait till the end of the year to be graded. They want to know how they’re doing while they’re doing it, and also what they need to do differently.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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What are you working on? How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along? Is there anything impeding your work? What do you need from me to be (more) successful? How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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For each objective, settle on no more than five measurable, unambiguous, time-bound key results—how the objective will be attained. By definition, completion of all key results equates to the attainment of the objective.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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The art of management,” Grove wrote, “lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop for a moment and shut out the noise. Close your eyes to really see what’s in front of you, and then pick the best way forward for you and your team, relative to the organization’s needs.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove’s highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I’m getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)
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Salim Ismail (Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it))
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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. (And if it isn’t, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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You can tell people to clean up a mess, but should you be telling them which broom to use? When top management was saying “We’ve got to crush Motorola!” somebody at the bottom might have said “Our benchmarks are lousy; I think I’ll write some better benchmarks.” That was how we worked.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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We use OKRs to plan what people are going to produce, track their progress vs. plan, and coordinate priorities and milestones between people and teams. We also use OKRs to help people stay focused on the most important goals, and help them avoid being distracted by urgent but less important goals.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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You’re not going to get the system just right the first time around. It’s not going to be perfect the second or third time, either. But don’t get discouraged. Persevere. You need to adapt it and make it your own.” Commitment feeds on itself. Stay the course with OKRs, as I know firsthand, and you will reap amazing benefits.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Bono, do you know the Senegalese proverb ‘If you want to cut a man’s hair, it is better if he is in the room’?” He said it in a loving way, but we didn’t miss the message: Be careful if you think you know what we want. Because we know what we want. You’re not African, and this messiah complex hasn’t always turned out so well.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Learning “from direct experience,” a Harvard Business School study found, “can be more effective if coupled with reflection—that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.” The philosopher and educator John Dewey went a step further: “We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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standout performance correlated to affirmative responses to these five questions: Structure and clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear? Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed? Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us? Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time? Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Divorce compensation (both raises and bonuses) from OKRs. These should be two distinct conversations, with their own cadences and calendars. The first is a backward-looking assessment, typically held at year’s end. The second is an ongoing, forward-looking dialogue between leaders and contributors. It centers on five questions: What are you working on? How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along? Is there anything impeding your work? What do you need from me to be (more) successful? How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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OKRs have two variants, and it is important to differentiate between them: Commitments are OKRs that we agree will be achieved, and we will be willing to adjust schedules and resources to ensure that they are delivered. The expected score for a committed OKR is 1.0; a score of less than 1.0 requires explanation for the miss, as it shows errors in planning and/or execution. By contrast, aspirational OKRs express how we’d like the world to look, even though we have no clear idea how to get there and/or the resources necessary to deliver the OKR. Aspirational OKRs have an expected average score of 0.7, with high variance.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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. 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. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”) You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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For the Chrome project, we created a sub-OKR to turbocharge JavaScript. The goal was to make applications on the web work as smoothly as downloads on a desktop. We set a moonshot goal of 10x improvement and named the project “V8,” after the high-performance car engine. We were fortunate to find a Danish programmer named Lars Bak, who’d built virtual machines for Sun Microsystems and held more than a dozen patents. Lars is one of the great artists in his field. He came to us and said, without an ounce of bravado, “I can do something that is much, much faster.” Within four months, he had JavaScript running ten times as fast as it ran on Firefox. Within two years, it was more than twenty times faster—incredible progress. (Sometimes a stretch goal is not as wildly aspirational as it may seem. As Lars later told Steven Levy in In the Plex, “We sort of underestimated what we could do.”)
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========
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Anonymous
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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.” A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results. (See chapter 4, “Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities.”) Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. Collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle. (See chapter 10, “Superpower #3: Track for Accountability.”) Dare to fail. “Output will tend to be greater,” Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. . . . Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.” 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. (See chapter 12, “Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing.”) A tool, not a weapon. 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.” To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate. (See chapter 15, “Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs.”) Be patient; be resolute. Every process requires trial and error. As Grove told his iOPEC students, Intel “stumbled a lot of times” after adopting OKRs: “We didn’t fully understand the principal purpose of it. And we are kind of doing better with it as time goes on.” An organization may need up to four or five quarterly cycles to fully embrace the system, and even more than that to build mature goal muscle.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Talking can transform minds, which can transform behaviors, which can transform institutions. —Sheryl Sandberg
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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In today’s workplace, OKRs and compensation can still be friends. They’ll never totally lose touch. But they no longer live together, and it’s healthier that way.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Are these the right things for me/you/us to be focused on? If I/you/we complete them, will it be seen as a huge success? Do you have any feedback on how I/we could stretch even more?
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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If companies “don’t continue to innovate, they’re going to die—and I didn’t say iterate, I said innovate.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Says Astro Teller: “If you want your car to get fifty miles per gallon, fine. You can retool your car a little bit. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas for five hundred miles, you have to start over.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Engineers struggle with goal setting in two big ways. They hate crossing off anything they think is a good idea, and they habitually underestimate how long it takes to get things done.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. —Yogi Berra
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Sergey said, “Well, we need to have some organizing principle. We don’t have one, and this might as well be it.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Google: The hairier the mission, the more important your OKRs.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Alongside focus, commitment is a core element of our first superpower. In implementing OKRs, leaders must publicly commit to their objectives and stay steadfast
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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My first PowerPoint slide defined OKRs: “A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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we broke the objective out into new revenue (marketing) and repeat revenue (product),
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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seminar on Intel strategy and operations. Resident professor: Dr. Andy Grove. In the space of an hour, Grove traced the company’s history, year by year. He summarized Intel’s core pursuits: a profit margin twice the industry norm, market leadership in any product line it entered, the creation of “challenging jobs” and “growth opportunities” for employees.* Fair enough, I thought, though I’d heard similar things at business school. Then he said something that left a lasting impression on me. He referenced his previous company, Fairchild, where he’d first met Noyce and Moore and went on to blaze a trail in silicon wafer research. Fairchild was the industry’s gold standard, but it had one great flaw: a lack of “achievement orientation.” “Expertise was very much valued there,” Andy explained. “That is why people got hired. That’s why people got promoted. Their effectiveness at translating that knowledge into actual results was kind of shrugged off.” At Intel, he went on, “we tend to be exactly the opposite. 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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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. 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. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”)
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Looking back, Ford didn’t lack for objectives or key results. But its goal-setting process was fatally flawed: “The specific, challenging goals were met (speed to market, fuel efficiency, and cost) at the expense of other important features that were not specified (safety, ethical behavior, and company reputation).
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Những gì anh biết gần như chả có gì quan trọng… Ý muốn nói kiến thức chỉ đứng hàng thứ hai và hành động mới là quan trọng nhất. Vâng, điều này thì tôi chưa hề học được ở Harvard. Nhưng Grove chưa dừng lại ở đó, dường như dành những thứ hay nhất cho cuối buổi thuyết trình. Grove vẽ ra một hệ thống mà ông ấy bắt đầu áp dụng năm 1971 khi Intel mới được 3 tuổi. Đây là lần đầu tiên trong đời tôi được thưởng thức nghệ thuật thiết lập mục tiêu. Tôi như bị thôi miên.
Đó là một phần trích đoạn để mô tả bằng một cách không son không phấn cho nhân vật mà tôi gọi là cha đẻ của OKRs.
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John Doerr (OKR: Objectives & Key Results: Wie Sie Ziele, auf die es wirklich ankommt, entwickeln, messen und umsetzen (German Edition))
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It takes intellectual rigor to effect change; it requires very serious strategies, indeed. 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.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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The founders were quintessential visionaries, with extreme entrepreneurial energy. What they lacked was management experience.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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 judgment, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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In the early 1980s, I took a fourteen-month sabbatical from Kleiner to lead the desktop division at Sun Microsystems. Suddenly I found myself in charge of hundreds of people. I was terrified. But Andy Grove’s system was my bastion in a storm, a source of clarity in every meeting I led. It empowered my executive team and rallied the whole operation. Yes, we made our share of mistakes. But we also achieved amazing things, including a new RISC microprocessor architecture, which secured Sun’s lead in the workstation market. That was my personal proof point for what I was bringing, all these years later, to Google.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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favorite definition of entrepreneurs: Those who do more than anyone thinks possible . . . with less than anyone thinks possible.*
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Maslow’s hierarchy of needs represented as a pyramid, with more basic needs at the base.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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From: Jonathan Rosenberg Date: Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 2:59 PM Subject: Amidst boundless opportunities, 13 PMs whiff on OKRs (names included) Product Gang, As most of you know, I strongly believe that having a good set of quarterly OKRs is an important part of being successful at Google. That’s why I regularly send you notes reminding you to get them done on time, and why I ask managers to review them to make sure all of our OKRs are good. I’ve tried notes that are nice and notes that are mean. Personal favorites include threatening you with Jonathan’s Pit of Despair in October 07 and celebrating near perfection in July 08. Over time I iterated this carrot/stick approach until we reached near 100% compliance. Yay! So then I stopped sending notes, and look what happened: this quarter, SEVERAL of you didn’t get your OKRs done on time, and several others didn’t grade your Q2 OKRs. It turns out it’s not the type of note I send that matters, but the fact that I send anything at all! Names of the fallen are duly noted below (with a pass given to several AdMob employees who are new to the ways of Google, and to many of you who missed the deadline but still got them done in July). We have so many great opportunities before us (search, ads, display, YouTube, Android, enterprise, local, commerce, Chrome, TV, mobile, social . . .) that if you can’t come up with OKRs that get you excited about coming to work every day, then something must be wrong. In fact, if that’s really the case, come see me. 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. Jonathan
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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He used a metaphor called the Big Rocks Theory, which was popularized by Stephen Covey. Say you have some rocks, and a bunch of pebbles, and some sand, and your goal is to fit as much of everything as you can into a wide-mouth, one-gallon jar. If you start with the sand, and then the pebbles, the jar will run out of room for all the rocks. But when you start with the rocks, add the pebbles, and save the sand for last, the sand fills the spaces between the rocks—everything fits. In other words, the most important things need to get done first or they won’t get done at all.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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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.” At Intel, Grove took a dim view of “managerial meddling”: “[T]he subordinate will begin to take a much more restricted view of what is expected of him, showing less initiative in solving his own problems and referring them instead to his [or her] supervisor. . . . [T]he output of the organization will consequently be reduced. . . .
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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El éxito no se construye a base de formularios, calificaciones y clasificaciones. No lo impulsan las políticas ni los programas que paralizan a las personas y obstaculizan el camino. Los verdaderos mecanismos del éxito son los que generan capacidades y habilitan a las personas para cumplir su función en la compañía.
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John Doerr (Mide lo que importa : cómo Google, Bono y la Fundación Gates cambian el mundo con OKR)
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OKRs surface your primary goals. They channel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Goal setting is more art than science. We weren’t just teaching people how to refine an objective or a measurable key result. We had a cultural agenda, as well. Why is transparency important? Why would you want people across other departments to know your goals? And why does what we’re doing matter? What is true accountability? What’s the difference between accountability with respect (for others’ failings) and accountability with vulnerability (for our own)? How can OKRs help managers “get work done through others”? (That’s a big factor for scalability in a growing company.) How do we engage other teams to adopt our objective as a priority and help assure that we reach it? When is it time to stretch a team’s workload—or to ease off on the throttle? When do you shift an objective to a different team member, or rewrite a goal to make it clearer, or remove it completely? In building contributors’ confidence, timing is everything.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Hasta que tus ejecutivos no estén metidos de lleno, no puedes esperar que los colaboradores se suban al carro, sobre todo cuando tus OKR son ambiciosos.
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John Doerr (Mide lo que importa : cómo Google, Bono y la Fundación Gates cambian el mundo con OKR)
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The single greatest motivator is ‘making progress in one’s work.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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[T]he harder the goal the higher the level of performance. . . . Although subjects with very hard goals reached their goals far less often than subjects with very easy goals, the former consistently performed at a higher level than the latter.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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To safeguard quality while pushing for quantitative deliverables, one solution is to pair key results—to measure “both effect and counter-effect,” as
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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ejecutivos, la falta de coordinación es el obstáculo número uno entre la estrategia y la ejecución.[5]
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John Doerr (Mide lo que importa : cómo Google, Bono y la Fundación Gates cambian el mundo con OKR)
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some significant percentage of people are working on the wrong things. The challenge is knowing which ones.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Coach” Bill Campbell’s wisdom is invoked more fleetingly. Here, then, is our opportunity to celebrate Bill, a man who gave so much to so many. From his gift for honest, open communication to his zeal for data-driven operating excellence, the Coach embodied the very spirit of OKRs. So it’s only fitting that he graces our close.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Superpower #3: Track for Accountability In God we trust; all others must bring data. —W. Edwards Deming
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Key Results Paired for Quantity and Quality
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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INTEL CORPORATE OBJECTIVE Establish the 8086 as the highest performance 16-bit microprocessor family, as measured by: KEY RESULTS (Q2 1980) Develop and publish five benchmarks showing superior 8086 family performance (Applications). Repackage the entire 8086 family of products (Marketing). Get the 8MHz part into production (Engineering, Manufacturing). Sample the arithmetic coprocessor no later than June 15 (Engineering).
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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the phrase “as measured by,” or a.m.b.—into Intel’s company OKRs. For example, “We will achieve a certain OBJECTIVE as measured by the following KEY RESULTS. . . .” Bill’s a.m.b made the implicit explicit to all.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)