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

“People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early. Salespeople understand shifting customer demands before management does; financial analysts are the earliest to know when the fundamentals of a business change.”

OKR shepherd to

Each quarter our department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies.

OKRs are inherently works in progress, not commandments chiseled in stone.

every employee in my department owns three to five business objectives per quarter, along with one or two personal ones.

Today, tens of billions of microcontrollers—in computers and cars, smart thermostats and blood-bank centrifuges—all run on Intel architecture. And as we’ve seen, none of this would have happened without OKRs.

So I’d come to a philosophy, my mantra: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

Quantity Goal Quality Goal Result Three new features Fewer than five bugs per feature in quality assurance testing Developers will write cleaner code.

Those who do more than anyone thinks possible . . . with less than anyone thinks possible.*