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

Contributors are most engaged when they can actually see how their work contributes to the company’s success. Quarter to quarter, day to day, they look for tangible measures of their achievement. Extrinsic rewards—the year-end bonus check—merely validate what they already know. OKRs speak to something more powerful, the intrinsic value of the work

Innovation tends to dwell less at the center of an organization than at its edges

As Jim Collins observes in Good to Great, first you need to get “the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Only then do you turn the wheel and step on the gas

Early on in your career, when you’re an individual contributor, you’re graded on the volume and quality of your work. Then one day, all of a sudden, you’re a manager. Let’s assume you do well and move up to manage more and more people. Now you’re no longer paid for the amount of work you do; you’re paid for the quality of decisions you make.

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

We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing

When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.

There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.