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

Intel treasured calculated risk takers. It was the place I learned to stretch and to dare to fail. In Operation Crush, the do-or-die campaign to dominate the 16-bit chip microprocessor market, the company’s salespeople were measured by design wins, the number of products designed around our 8086 microprocessor. Led by Bill Davidow, the Crush task f

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.

users align roughly half of their OKRs with the goals of higher-ups or their department. Collectively,

the son of a computer science pioneer. He was a soft-spoken nonconformist, a rebel with a 10x cause:

“[T]he harder the goal the higher the level of performance. . . . Although subjects with very hard goals reached their goals far less often than subjects with very easy goals, the former consistently performed at a higher level than the latter.”

Two OKR Baskets Google divides its OKRs into two categories, committed goals and aspirational (or “stretch”) goals. It’s a distinction with a real difference.

Or as Larry Page would say, winning organizations need to “put more wood behind fewer arrows.” That, in very few and focused words, is the essence of our first superpower.

The company had leased the building two months earlier, outgrowing a space above an ice-cream parlor in downtown Palo Alto. Two months before that, I’d placed my biggest bet in nineteen years as a venture capitalist, an $11.8 million wager for 12 percent of a start-up founded by a pair of Stanford grad school dropouts. I joined Google’s board. I wa

Google divides its OKRs into two categories, committed goals and aspirational (or “stretch”) goals. It’s a distinction with a real difference.