Manager-to-Leader Transition Blindspot

"Early on in your career, when you’re an individual contributor, you’re graded on the volume and quality of your work. Then one day, all of a sudden, you’re a manager. 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."

"(For managers, one particular benefit of OKRs is to lead them to hires who can compensate for their own limitations.) Our people stopped dancing around their setbacks. They began to realize there was no shame in trying your hardest and failing, not when OKRs help you fail smart and fail fast."

"It’s hard to deny the explicit value of OKRs, like how they help tie an organization to the leadership’s true ambitions. But for young companies like Zume, especially, there’s an equally important implicit value that gets overlooked. OKRs are a superb training tool for executives and managers. They teach you how to manage your business within existing limits. It’s important to push the envelope, but the envelope is real. Everybody faces resource constraints: time, money, people. And the bigger an organization, the more entropy—it’s like thermodynamics."