Blog · 50 Bits for Founders · Strategy
Measure What Matters
How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs — John Doerr, 2018
The Bitfocus the organization on a few ambitious, measurable goals, calibrated on the frontier between the possible and the fanciful.
Good ideas are plentiful; what's scarce is executing them with focus. That is John Doerr's bet: OKRs, objectives and key results, turn ambition into measurable results.
The author's line: "Ideas are easy. Execution is everything."
The book is especially relevant at a moment every founder recognizes. Your company grew and now everyone is busy, but no one is aligned. Each area chases its own list, priorities change every week and you are the only one who sees the whole map. The bottleneck is you.
The method attacks exactly that. It starts with three to five objectives per cycle (when an organization sets twelve objectives, it hasn't set any; the limit is what forces you to choose what matters most) and hangs five or fewer key results on each, each with a number, a date and an owner responsible for delivering it. The best OKRs live on the frontier of the possible: uncomfortably ambitious but genuinely achievable. And being possible, they unfold: you define in detail what the company that does achieve them looks like, make the concrete plans to get there, and fight against all odds to deliver that result.
Let at least half the objectives come from the bottom up (with five, about three proposed by the teams), because when leadership dictates all the OKRs without the team's input, commitment collapses. Make them public: everyone sees everyone's OKRs, including yours, and transparency aligns more than any meeting. Separate them from compensation, so people dare to set ambitious goals without penalty. And distinguish two types: committed OKRs are met one hundred percent; for aspirational ones, the moonshots, the healthy range of achievement is around seventy percent, and that sustained average is your calibration thermometer: consistently far above, you're not setting ambitious enough goals; consistently far below, you set them out of reach. No set-and-forget: they are reviewed and regraded on a cadence, accompanied by continuous conversations and feedback.
The difference between applying it well and applying it as a fad shows quickly. Done well, it's three objectives everyone recites from memory; done badly, fifteen in a spreadsheet no one opens. Done well, it's a business result, like lowering churn from 5% to 3%; done badly, a list of activities disguised as goals. Done well, it's a living tool reviewed every week; done badly, a bureaucratic ritual that comes back to life at the end of every quarter.
How to start this process? Write your quarter's number-one objective on the frontier of the possible, hang three key results on it with number, date and owner, mark it as committed or aspirational, present it to your direct team and ask each of them for theirs by Friday, making sure that at least half of what results comes from them, not from you.
This method for setting and aligning goals doesn't only work with your team; it's also the best way to open a board meeting, and it works equally well personally: health, family, learning.
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How it helped me
A founder, by nature, wants to conquer the world: they tend to sacrifice short-term benefits, and their motivation and incentives are focused on achieving the impossible. That mindset doesn't have to change with the size of the company. Paul Graham explains it in his essay "Founder Mode," which we'll see later: founders who lead like professional managers, delegating without getting involved, tend to lose exactly what made their company great.
Well-paid executives content with their compensation rarely have that level of ambition, and it's predictable that they'll show up with less ambitious proposals. As Lafley and Martin warn in Playing to Win, playing just to participate is more dangerous: less talent and fewer resources get devoted to it, and so it is more likely to fail.
That's why it's so important that the founder keeps pushing goals on the frontier of the possible. If they tell you a goal is bad because there's no basis for believing it will be met, the counterargument is that an ambitious goal, by definition, doesn't have all the hows solved on day one: it requires research, thinking outside the box and experimenting. That's how big things get done.
Killer quote: "Grasp all, lose all."