Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting. As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner likes to say, “When you are tired of sa

This book—with its companion website, whatmatters.com—is my chance to bring a long-held passion to you, my reader. I hope you find it useful. I can tell you it has changed my

As they shift from planning to execution, managers and contributors alike tie their day-to-day activities to the organization’s vision. The term for this linkage is alignment,

“Google’s objective is to be the systematic innovator of scale. Innovator means new stuff. And scale means big, systematic ways of looking at things done in a way that’s reproducible.”

As general manager, I cascade my goal down to the next level of management, the head coach and the senior vice president of marketing. My key results become their objectives. (See OKR Chart 2.)

The one thing an [OKR] system should provide par excellence is focus. This can only happen if we keep the number of objectives small …. Each time you make a commitment, you forfeit your chance to commit to something else.

Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. (And if it isn’t, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)

Let’s assume you do well and move up to manage more and more people. Now you’re no longer paid for the amount of work you do; you’re paid for the quality of decisions you make. But no one tells you the rules have changed. When you hit a wall, you think, I’ll just work harder—that’s what got me here. What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop

Then come the four OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch.