Sublime

“[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.”

We discuss them at weekly all-hands meetings. At a recent off-site retreat, I demonstrated our OKR process to the larger leadership group—and they just ate it up. “Best off-site we’ve ever had,”

When he saw a manager failing, he would try to find another role—perhaps at a lower level—where

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

OKR has a single owner,

Engineers struggle with goal setting in two big ways. They hate crossing off anything they think is a good idea, and they habitually underestimate how long it takes to get things done.

healthy proportion of bottom-up OKRs—roughly

Grove was fascinated to find that some people, with no prompting, were consistently driven to “try to test the outer limits of their abilities” and achieve their “personal best.” These employees were a manager’s dream; they were never self-satisfied. But Grove also understood that not everyone was a natural-born achiever. For the rest, “stretched”