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

raises and bonuses) from OKRs.

Objectives and key results are the yin and yang of goal setting—principle and practice, vision and execution. Objectives are the stuff of inspiration and far horizons. Key results are more earthbound and metric-driven.

“pulse” surveys

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

of its associated key results. Google uses a scale of 0 to 1.0: 0.7 to 1.0 = green.* (We delivered.) 0.4 to 0.6 = yellow. (We made progress, but fell short of completion.) 0.0 to 0.3 = red. (We failed to make real progress.)

Good to Great

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

Say Employee A is struggling to reach a quarterly objective. Because she has publicly tracked her progress, colleagues can see she needs help. They jump in, posting comments and offering support. The work improves. Equally important, work relationships are deepened, even transformed.

With OKR transparency, everyone’s goals—from the CEO down—are openly shared. Individuals link their objectives to the company’s game plan, identify cross-dependencies, and coordinate with other teams.