We're implementing OKR's at CREXi (my company), so I figured I should read the bible on the subject to get familiar. I was not disappointed. Measure What Matters is part how-to guide, part case study, and part culture guide. It lays out a goal setting framework for companies and shows how it's used at companies like Google. It also explores how this framework affects culture at companies like Intel. Anyone in a leadership position at a company should read this one.
Key Takeaways
Memorable Quotes
Rating: 9/10
Any leader in a mission driven organization should read this book. Even if you don't take OKRs to your team, there are other goal-setting and cultural takeaways. If you're ambitious and diligent, there's no reason you can't apply OKRs to your own life! Happy goal hunting!
Key Takeaways
- OKR's (Objectives and Key Results) are a simple framework for goal setting at a company.
- Objectives are the "what," the direction we want to go.
- Key Results are the "how," the specific and measurable goals we need to hit to say we reached the Objective.
- Companies should set 3-5 OKR's that are then trickled down through departments.
- Individual Contributors in departments should construct OKR's that then trickle up.
- OKR's should be transparent across the entire organization.
- The expected achievement of "Committed" OKRs is 100%.
- The expected achievement of "Stretch" OKRs is 70%. Higher means you didn't reach enough with your goal setting.
Memorable Quotes
- 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.
- 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.
- We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.
- 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.
- "Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them."
- When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.
- An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.
- Alongside focus, commitment is a core element of our first superpower. In implementing OKRs, leaders must publicly commit to their objectives and stay steadfast.
- 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.”)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Rating: 9/10
Any leader in a mission driven organization should read this book. Even if you don't take OKRs to your team, there are other goal-setting and cultural takeaways. If you're ambitious and diligent, there's no reason you can't apply OKRs to your own life! Happy goal hunting!
