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

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

A few goal-setting ground rules: Key results should be succinct, specific, and measurable. A mix of outputs and inputs is helpful. Finally, completion of all key results must result in attainment of the objective. If not, it’s not an OKR.fn3

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