Measure What Matters (John Doerr, 2018)

Measure What Matters is one of the best business books on strategy and, more importantly, execution. ‘Getting things done’ is perhaps the most overlooked part of management, and in this practical book John Doerr builds a case of how Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can save one from a fuzzy thinking.

Here are some incisive quotes from the book.

What are OKRs?

“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.” (pp.7)

“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.” (pp.7)

“Objectives are the stuff of inspiration and far horizons. Key results are more earth bound and metric-driven.” (pp.50)

“OKRs are the vehicle of choice for vertical alignment.” (pp.79)

“The most powerful OKRs typically stem from insights outside the C-Suite.” (pp.87)

“An optimal OKR system frees contributors to set at least some of their own objectives and most or all of their key results.” (pp.88)

“OKRs are not islands. To the contrary, they create networks — vertical, horizontal, diagonal — to connect an organization’s most vital work” (pp.91)

People practices

“At Intel, Andy recruited ‘aggressive introverts’ in his own image, people who solved problems quickly, objectively, systematically, and permanently.” (pp.26)

“In implementing OKRs, leaders must publicly commit to their objectives and stay steadfast.” (pp.69)

“A healthy OKR environment strikes a balance between alignment and autonomy, common purpose and creative attitude.” (pp.88)

“High-functioning teams thrive on a creative tension between top-down and bottom-up goals setting, a mix of aligned and unaligned OKRs.” (pp.88)

“Leaders must convey two things: the importance of the outcome, and the belief that it’s attainable.”

“A team composed of a few percent of company’s workforce, acting in concert toward an ambitious common goal, can change an entire mature industry in less than two years.” (pp.255)

Quotes by other leaders

“It’s not a key result unless it has a number” — Marissa Mayer

“As much as I hate process, good ideas with great execution are how you make magic.” — Larry Page

“OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of ‘organizing the world’s information’ perhaps even achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most.” — Larry Page

“‘Hard goals’ drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, ‘specific hard goals’ produce a higher level of output than vaguely worded ones.” — Edwin Locke

“Google’s objective is to be systematic innovator of scale. Innovator means new stuff. And scale means big, systematic ways of looking at things done in a way that’s reproducible” — Eric Schmidt.

“Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”- Andy Grove

“When you’re the CEO or the founder of a company…you’ve got to say ‘This is what we’re doing,’ and then you have to model it. Because if you don’t model it, no one’s going to do it.” — Bill Campbell

“When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.” — Jeff Weiner

“The art of management 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.”- Andy Grove

“The winning organizations need to put more wood behind fewer arrows” — Larry Page

People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early. Salespeople understand shifting customer demands before management does; financial analysts are the earliest to know when the fundamentals of a business change.” — Andy Grove

“If you can’t come up with OKRs that get you excited about coming to work everyday, then something must be wrong.” — Jonathan Rosenberg

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.” — Stephen Covey

“We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience” — John Dewey

“Most people tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible.” — Larry Page

“If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.” — Larry Page

“Be ‘uncomfortably excited’. Have a healthy disregard for the impossible” — Larry Page

“Google is propelled by our moonshot culture. The very ambitious is very hard to do. In a healthy way, our team realized that the success of Chrome would ultimately mean hundreds of millions of users. Whenever we invent something new at Google, we’re always thinking: How can we scale it to a billion? Early in the process, that number can seem very abstract. But when you set a measurable objective for the year and chunk the problem, quarter by quarter, moonshots become more doable. That’s one of the great benefits of OKRs. They give us clear, quantitative targets on the road to those qualitative leaps.” — Sundar Pichai

“In a world where computing power is nearly limitless, the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.” — Satya Nadella

“In a fast-growing company’ it’s challenging to get everybody to align and focus around the same objective. People need a benchmark to know how they’re performing against it. The catch is to find the right one.” — Susan Wojcicki

“People aren’t wired to be nomads. They just need to find a place where they feel they can make a real impact.” — Donna Morris