Doerr J. (2018). Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs New York, NY: Porfolio.

Doerr is likely Andy Grove’s most loyal disciple, preaching Grove’s OKR management philosophy his entire life. This book is a collection of stories on how different organizations implemented OKR. It all started when Doerr was a summer intern at Intel. He somehow got admitted to Intel’s Organization, Philosophy, and Economics course taught by Andy Grove, from whom he learned the single most important lesson in his career:

“it almost doesn’t matter what you know, what matters is how you execute”

This is so true. There are so many people in this world who are way smarter than us and have much better ideas than us. But it is the people who could well execute those ideas that eventually prevail and succeed. In High Output Management, Grove also briefly explained the concept of OKR, except that he called it MBO (Management by Objectives), an idea coined by Peter Drucker:

“A successful MBO system needs only to answer two questions:

1. Where do I want to go? (The answer provides the objective.)

2. How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (The answer gives us milestones, or key results.)”

Doerr further drives this idea home by making the differences and connections between objective and key results more explicit (here I picked the OKR from Intuit as an example to demonstrate because I have a feeling that this might be something that we will be doing in the company as well sooner or later):

Differences

While objective is a high level statement of the vision (“Enable every Intuit workers to make decisions based on “live” data), key results has to be measurable:

“at the end you can look, and without any arguments: Did I do that or did I not do it? Yes? No? Simple. No judgements in it” (John Doerr)

“to be useful a key result must contain very specific wording and dates, so that when deadline time arrives, there is no room for ambiguity” (Andy Grove)

All the above four key results could be clearly answered in a binary format but then they lack a deadline, which makes it hard for people to understand whether they are on track or not from a schedule perspective.

Connections

The successful completion of the key results guarantees the attainment of the objective. When those four key results are successfully completed, then workers in intuit would have both the technology and the skill sets to make decisions based on “live” data. Here is an example of wrong pairing of objectives and key results that I think of: let’s say our objective is to be the fastest running person in the world. Choosing the key result “running faster than Usain Bolt” would not guarantees the attainment of that objective because maybe you run faster than him when he’s not performing at his peak or when he is sick or when he is not running at his full speed, there are all these other uncertainties that could allow you to “run faster than Usain Bolt” but not becoming “the fastest running person in the world”. A better alternative for key result would be “run 100m in less than 9.58 seconds (the current world record for 100m)”.

Similar to Doerr, another thing I really like is the explicit of the phrase “as measured by” introduced by Bill Davidow. By using this phrase, we could make our OKR in the following structure:

“We will achieve a certain OBJECTIVE as measured by the following KEY RESULTS…”

This structure makes it easy for me to ensure the right pairing of objective and key results.

While In general there are a lot more attention and literature around the power of OKR, I would also like to ensure that we don’t miss the often forgotten younger sibling of OKR: CFR, which Doerr dedicates the second part of the book to.

CFR stands for conversation, feedback and recognition. In a nutshell, CFR is needed because it wraps OKR with humanity. Doerr describes it really well:

“What business leaders have learned, very painfully, is that individuals cannot be reduced to numbers. Even Peter Drucker, the champion of well-measured goals, understood the limits of calibration. A manager’s “first role,” Drucker said, “is the personal one. It’s the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence . . . the creation of a community.” Or as Albert Einstein observed, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”