Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting. As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner likes to say, “When you are tired of sa

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting. As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner likes to say, “When you are tired of sa

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting.

An effective goal management system—an OKR system—links goals to a team’s broader mission. It

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