Radical Focus

How to Hold a Meeting to Set OKRs for the Quarter

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Once you have picked the goal you want your team to focus on, you have to reiterate it daily. But it’s not enough to talk about it, you must weave reminders into every aspect of the company life. Progress toward the goal must be marked in status meetings and weekly status emails.

This is the downfall of many an MBA. You love numbers. You love money. Doesn’t everyone? The OKR unifies multidisciplinary teams, and that means the dreamy designers, the idealist engineers and the caring customer service. The Objective needs to be inspirational, a call-to-action that gets folks to leap out of bed, ready for a new day and a new cha

Five: We give up instead of iterate.

Scrum is a technique used by engineers to commit to progress and hold each other both accountable and to support each other. Each week an engineer shares what happened last week, what they commit to doing next week, and any blockers that keep them from their goals.

The Eisenhower Box is a common time management tool. Most people focus on the lower right, where you stop doing what is unimportant and not urgent. But how many people take the upper left seriously and schedule what must be done? Urgent things get done, both important and unimportant, because we feel keenly the pressure of time. Unless we bring tha

Hanna was ready for this. “Google started with OKRs when they were a year old, and it worked for them. Many small companies become big companies because of OKRs. And guys, we may not have made our OKRs, but we should be grateful they showed us we’ve got a problem with focus.”

Why is this? If it is important, then why doesn’t it happen? I believe there are five reasons. One: We haven’t prioritized our goals.

“Yes, yes, yes. What’s in the last slot?” Hanna asked, pointing at the lower left. She felt renewed and inspired. “I call that ‘heads up.’ It’s the pipeline of important things you expect to happen in the next month. That way Marketing, Engineering, Sales and all don’t get caught flat footed when something has to be supported.”