
Saved by Eric Johnson and
Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth
Saved by Eric Johnson and
Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. (And if it isn’t, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)
But make no mistake. For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.
defined OKRs: “A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.”
The one thing an [OKR] system should provide par excellence is focus. This can only happen if we keep the number of objectives small …. Each time you make a commitment, you forfeit your chance to commit to something else.
Measuring what matters begins with the question: What is most important for the next three (or six, or twelve) months?
Google CEO Sundar Pichai once told me that his team often “agonized” over their goal-setting process: “There are single OKR lines on which you can spend an hour and a half thinking, to make sure we are focused on doing something better for the user.” That’s part of the territory. But to paraphrase Voltaire: Don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy o
... See morean ongoing, forward-looking dialogue between leaders and contributors. It centers on five questions: • What are you working on? • How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along? • Is there anything impeding your work? • What do you need from me to be (more) successful? • How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?
Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle.
OKRs: “A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.”