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

rollout of OKRs with upper management first.

Aspirational goals draw on every OKR superpower. Focus and commitment are a must for targeting goals that make a real difference. Only a transparent, collaborative, aligned, and connected organization can achieve so far beyond the norm. And without quantifiable tracking, how can you know when you’ve reached that amazing stretch objective?

While Larry and Sergey had few preconceptions about running a business, they knew that writing goals down would make them real.* They loved the notion of laying out what mattered most to them—on one or two succinct pages—and making it public to everyone at Google. They intuitively grasped how OKRs could keep an organization on course

In Google’s early years, Larry Page set aside two days per quarter to personally scrutinize the OKRs for each and every software engineer.

healthy proportion of bottom-up OKRs—roughly