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

In an OKR system, the most junior staff can look at everyone’s goals, on up to the CEO. Critiques

But when you set a measurable objective for the year and chunk the problem, quarter by quarter, moonshots become more doable. That’s one of the great benefits of OKRs.

Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers.

CFRs (chapters 15 and 16): The failings of annual performance reviews have sparked a robust alternative—continuous performance management. I will introduce OKRs’ younger sibling, CFRs (Conversation, Feedback, Recognition), and show how OKRs and CFRs can team up to lift leaders, contributors, and organizations to a whole new level.

“We didn’t want bureaucratic compliance,” Atticus says. “We wanted enthusiastic compliance. I

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

The career of Sundar Pichai is a stretch goal personified. In October 2015, at age forty-three, Sundar became Google’s third CEO. Today he presides over an organization with more than sixty thousand employees and $80 billion in revenues.

Now, did we dominate the mid-range microcomputer business? That’s for us to argue in the years to come, but over the next quarter we’ll know whether we’ve won ten new designs or not.

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

As the company expanded, Larry continued to kick off each quarter with