Measure What Matters

because OKRs are transparent, they can be shared without cascading them in lockstep. If it serves the larger purpose, multiple levels of hierarchy can be skipped over. Rather than laddering down from the CEO to a VP to a director to a manager (and then to the manager’s reports), an objective might jump from the CEO straight to a manager, or from a director to an individual contributor.

People who choose their destination will own a deeper awareness of what it takes to get there.

When our how is defined by others, the goal won’t engage us to the same degree. If my doctor orders me to lower my blood pressure by training for the San Francisco Marathon, I might grudgingly take it under advisement. But if I decide of my own free will to run the race, I’m far more likely to reach the finish line—especially if I’m running with friends.

High-functioning teams thrive on a creative tension between top-down and bottom-up goal setting, a mix of aligned and unaligned OKRs.

The more ambitious the stretch in the objective, the more conservatively people made their KRs—a classic unintended consequence.

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.

“The single greatest motivator is ‘making progress in one’s work.’ The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged.”

As noted in chapter 4, the simple act of writing down a goal increases your chances of reaching it. Your odds are better still if you monitor progress while sharing the goal with colleagues—two integral OKR features.

While OKRs are primarily a positive force for more, they also stop us from persisting in the wrong direction.

Whenever a key result or objective becomes obsolete or impractical, feel free to end it midstream. There’s no need to hold stubbornly to an outdated projection—strike it from your list and move on.

As a rule, we’d enter a quarter knowing we wouldn’t achieve all of them. If a department so much as approached 100 percent, it was presumed to be setting its sights too low—and there would be hell to pay.

The point of objectives and key results, after all, is to get everyone working on the right things.

In my view, the key to satisfaction is to set aggressive goals, achieve most of them, pause to reflect on the achievement, and then repeat the cycle.

What have I learned that might alter my approach to the next cycle’s OKRs?

After thoroughly appraising your work and owning up to any shortfalls, take a breath to savor your progress. Throw a party with the team to celebrate your growing OKR superpowers. You’ve earned it.

OKRs push us far beyond our comfort zones. They lead us to achievements on the border between abilities and dreams. They unearth fresh capacity, hatch more creative solutions, revolutionize business models.

“[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.” The studies found that “stretched” workers were not only more productive, but more motivated and engaged:

Aspirational goals draw on every OKR superpower. Focus and commitment are a must for targeting goals that make a real difference.

only after we satisfy more basic concerns—starting with food and shelter, then safety, then “love” and “belongingness”—can we move to higher-level motivations.

a ten percent improvement means that you’re doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.