An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution.

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

To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate.

Crush, the purpose: To establish a sense of urgency and set in motion critical, corporate-wide decisions and action plans to address a life-threatening competitive challenge.

As Bill Campbell liked to say: If companies “don’t continue to innovate, they’re going to die—and I didn’t say iterate, I said innovate.” Conservative goal setting stymies innovation. And innovation is like oxygen: You cannot win without it.

“If we take this one off the road map this quarter, what happens? Would it really affect the user experience?” More

we failed to make the dependency explicit.

“[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.”

Google turned to its mission statement: Organize the world’s information and make