[1/4] Measure What Matters: How Google, Intel and Others Grow with OKRs (Category Management)
John Doerr’s book describes OKRs: Objectives and Key Results. Doerr is a well-known billionaire venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. In 1999 he invested $12 million in Google on the firm’s behalf, receiving 12% of the company and a board seat. He then introduced OKRs, which Google embraced so enthusiastically that Larry Page wrote the book’s foreword.
The book is interesting as much for its stories of leading companies adopting OKRs as for its explanation of the method. It has two parts: OKRs in action and new ways of working.
Part 1. OKRs in action 1) Google: meet OKRs The opening chapter introduces the concepts and explains how Doerr pitched them to Google when it was a small startup. He names four OKR superpowers:
- Focus and commitment
- Alignment and transparency
- Tracking
- Stretching for outstanding results
Continuous performance management, rather than an annual exercise, and the right culture also matter.
2) The father of OKRs Doerr recalls his mentor Andy Grove, Intel’s long-serving leader. While working there, he saw Grove extend Management by Objectives, popularised by Peter Drucker, by attaching key results to objectives. Doerr credits Grove with inventing OKRs. The chapter draws on Intel’s struggle to survive as it shifted from memory to microprocessors. Grove described this period in Only the Paranoid Survive, which I discussed before. His other excellent book, High Output Management, is now more than forty years old.
3) Operation Crush: Intel The story describes Intel defeating Motorola through marketing and company-wide focus with OKRs, despite its Intel 8086 being the weaker product compared with Motorola’s 68000. In this telling, x86 began with a marketing victory rather than a technological one :). Read more here. Motorola failed to respond quickly enough to aggressive marketing and lost the market. It is interesting to compare that with Intel’s present struggle for the chip market.
4) Superpower 1: focus and commitment OKRs should make the company’s priorities for the coming period clear and show people where to direct their efforts. Objectives inspire and point towards new horizons; key results provide concrete measures of whether those objectives have been achieved. Key results should be concise, specific and measurable, and completing all of them should achieve the objective. Keep OKRs few — no more than three — and meaningful. They should not be a list of everyday duties or wishes.
The review continues in the next posts.
#Management #Leadership #Processes #Engineering #Project