John Doerr

"Research shows that public goals are more likely to be attained than goals held in private. Simply flipping the switch to “open” lifts achievement across the board."

"Self-assessment In evaluating OKR performance, objective data is enhanced by the goal setter’s thoughtful, subjective judgment. For any given goal in a given quarter, there may be extenuating circumstances. A weak showing by the numbers might hide a strong effort; a strong one could be artificially inflated."

"Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing"

"OKR wrap-ups are retrospective and forward-looking at the same time. An unfinished objective might be rolled over to the next quarter, with a fresh set of key results—or perhaps its moment has passed, and it is appropriately dropped. Either way, sound management judgment comes first."

"As the excitement over high-speed modems made headlines, I got a call in December 1994 from John Doerr, a Silicon Valley investor at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, renowned for his Midas touch with start-ups in the computer industry. He backed Compaq, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and later, Amazon and Google."

"ONLY COACH THE COACHABLE On a January day in 2002, Jonathan drove over to the Google office in Mountain View, where he thought he was going to pick up a formal job offer to become head of the growing Google product team. He thought the job was a lock, but once he arrived, he was escorted to a plain conference room where a gruff, older guy greeted him. It was the first time Jonathan met Bill. He couldn’t quite remember who Bill was, and did not realize, at least at first, that this guy was the final gateway on the road to employment at the company. No problem, thought Jonathan, I’m a pretty big deal, SVP from a successful tech company, @Home. I got this! Bill looked at Jonathan for what seemed like minutes, then told him that he had spoken with a few of the principals from @Home: its cofounder Tom Jermoluk; its first CEO, William Randolph Hearst III; and one of its investors, John Doerr, who was also on Google’s board. The consensus, Bill reported, was that Jonathan was smart and worked hard. Jonathan’s chest puffed a bit. “But I don’t care about any of that,” Bill said. “I only have one question: Are you coachable?” Jonathan instantly, and regrettably, replied: “It depends on the coach.” Wrong answer. “Smart alecks are not coachable,” Bill snapped. He stood up to leave, interview over, as it dawned on Jonathan that he had heard Eric Schmidt was getting coaching from someone and, oh my God, this must be the guy. Jonathan switched from smart-aleck mode to groveling mode, backing away from his quip (which wasn’t exactly a quip), and asked Bill to continue the conversation. After another moment that felt like minutes, Bill sat back down and talked about how he chose the people he was going to work with based on humility. Leadership is not about you, it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team. Bill believed that good leaders grow over time, that leadership accrues to them from their teams. He thought people who were curious and wanted to learn new things were best suited for this. There was no room in this formula for smart alecks and their hubris. Bill then asked, “What do you want to get out of a coach?” This felt like, and indeed was, a change-your-life-forever moment. And Jonathan couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally and fortunately, in what football fans might call a Hail Mary play, he remembered a quote from Tom Landry, who coached the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys for twenty-nine years, a stint that included twenty straight winning seasons and two Super Bowl titles. “A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.” That’s what I want, Jonathan told Bill. It worked. Jonathan not only got the job, he got the coach he didn’t think he needed, but sorely did."

"“We’re all here to help. We’re all in the same bathwater.” As far as I know, “selling your reds” is a unique use of OKRs, and one well worth emulating."

"(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."

"Manager-led Coaching To prepare for this conversation, the manager should consider the following questions: What behaviors or values do I want my report to continue to exhibit? What behaviors or values do I want the report to start or stop exhibiting? What coaching can I provide to help the report fully realize his or her potential? During the conversation, the leader might ask:…"

"Focus and Commit to Priorities Set the appropriate cadence for your OKR cycle. I recommend dual tracking, with quarterly OKRs (for shorter-term goals) and annual OKRs (keyed to longer-term strategies) deployed in parallel. To work out implementation kinks and strengthen leaders’ commitment, phase in your rollout of OKRs with upper management first. Allow the process to gain momentum before enlisting individual contributors to join in. Designate an OKR shepherd to make sure that every individual devotes the time each cycle to choosing what matters most. Commit to three to five top objectives—what you need to achieve—per cycle. Too many OKRs dilute and scatter people’s efforts. Expand your effective capacity by deciding what not to do, and discard, defer, or deemphasize accordingly. In choosing OKRs, look for objectives with the most leverage for outstanding performance. Find the raw material for top-line OKRs in the organization’s mission statement, strategic plan, or a broad theme chosen by leadership. To emphasize a departmental objective and enlist lateral support, elevate it to a company OKR. For each objective, settle on no more than five measurable, unambiguous, time-bound key results—how the objective will be attained. By definition, completion of all key results…"

"Upward Feedback To elicit candid input from a contributor, the manager might ask: What are you getting from me that you find helpful? What are you getting from me that impedes your ability to be effective? What could…"

"Progress Updates To get the contributor talking, a manager might pose these questions: How are your OKRs coming along? What critical capabilities do you need to be successful? Is there anything stopping you from attaining your objectives? What OKRs need to be…"

"He knew that most times in business there were several right answers, and the leader’s job was to pick one. “Just make a decision,” he’d say. Or: “Are you moving forward? Are you breaking ties? Let’s keep rolling.”"

"A Typical OKR Cycle Let’s assume you are setting OKRs at the company, team, and contributor levels. (Larger companies may have additional levels.) 4–6 weeks before quarter Brainstorm Annual and Q1 OKRs for Company Senior leaders start brainstorming top-line company OKRs. If you’re setting OKRs for Q1, this is also the time to set your annual plan, which can help guide the direction of company. 2 weeks before quarter Communicate Company-wide OKRs for Upcoming Year and Q1 Finalize company OKRs and communicate them to everyone. Start of quarter Communicate Team Q1 OKRs Based on the company’s OKRs, teams develop their own OKRs and share them at their meetings. 1 week after Start of quarter Share Employee Q1 OKRs One week after team OKRs are communicated, contributors share their own OKRs. This may require negotiation between contributors and their managers, typically in one-on-one settings. Throughout quarter Employees Track Progress and Check-in Throughout the quarter, employees measure and share their progress, checking in regularly with their managers. Periodically through the quarter, contributors assess how likely they are to fully achieve their OKRs. If attainment appears unlikely, they may need to recalibrate. Near end of quarter Employees Reflect and Score Q1 OKRs Toward the end of the quarter, contributors score their OKRs, perform a self-assessment, and reflect on what they have accomplished."

"Track for Accountability To build a culture of accountability, install continuous reassessment and honest and objective grading—and start at the top. When leaders openly admit their missteps, contributors feel freer to take healthy risks. Motivate contributors less with extrinsic rewards and more with open, tangible measures of their achievement. To keep OKRs timely and relevant, have the designated shepherd ride herd over regular check-ins and progress updates. Frequent check-ins enable teams and individuals to course-correct with agility, or to fail fast. To sustain high performance, encourage weekly one-on-one OKR meetings between contributors and managers, plus monthly departmental meetings. As conditions change, feel free to revise, add, or delete OKRs as appropriate—even in mid-cycle. Goals are not written in stone. It’s counterproductive to hold stubbornly to objectives that are no longer relevant or attainable. At the cycle’s end, use OKR grades plus subjective self-assessments to evaluate past performance, celebrate achievements, and plan and improve for the future.…"

"OKRs are big, not incremental—we don’t expect to hit all of them. (If we do, we’re not setting them aggressively enough.) We grade them with a color scale to measure how well we did: 0.0–0.3 is red 0.4–0.6 is yellow 0.7–1.0 is green"

"Four Superpowers of OKRs Focus and Commit to Priorities Align and Connect for Teamwork Track for Accountability Stretch for Amazing Continuous…"

"There is no handbook to address these questions. The wisdom resides in leaders with personal connections to their teams, to managers who can show what success looks like and know when to declare victory. (My advice: Not too soon.)"

"Career Growth To tease out a contributor’s career aspirations, a manager might ask: What skills or capabilities would you like to develop to improve in your current role? In what areas do you want to grow to achieve your career goals? What skills or capabilities would you like to develop for a future role? From a learning,…"

"Continuous Performance Management To address issues before they become problems and give struggling contributors the support they need, move from annual performance management to continuous performance management. Unleash ambitious goal setting by divorcing forward-looking OKRs from backward-looking annual reviews. Equating goal attainment to bonus checks will invite sandbagging and risk-averse behavior. Replace competitive ratings and stack rankings with transparent, strength-based, multidimensional criteria for performance evaluations. Beyond the numbers, consider a contributor’s team play, communication, and ambition in goal setting. Rely on intrinsic motivations—purposeful work and opportunities for growth—over financial incentives. They’re far more powerful. To power positive business results, implement ongoing CFRs (conversations, feedback, and recognition) in concert with structured goal setting. Transparent OKRs make coaching more concrete and useful. Continuous CFRs keep day-to-day work on point and genuinely collaborative. In performance-driving conversations between managers and contributors, allow the contributor to set the agenda. The manager’s role is to learn and coach. Make performance feedback two-way, ad hoc, and multidirectional, unconstrained by the org chart. Use anonymous “pulse” surveys for real-time feedback on…"

"OKRs take out the ambiguity. And when you do that, some people will say, “This isn’t what I thought I signed up for, and I’m leaving.” But others will say, “I’m inspired because I finally know what we’re trying to do.” Either way, there’s clarity. For those who stay, you’ve laid the foundation for engagement. Everybody’s…"

"Goal Planning and Reflection To help facilitate this conversation, a manager might ask a contributor the following: What OKRs do you plan to focus on to drive the greatest value for your role, your team, and/or the company? Which…"

"Culture, as the saying goes, eats strategy for breakfast. It’s our stake in the ground; it’s what makes meaning of work. Leaders are rightly obsessed with culture. Founders ask how they can protect their companies’ cultural values as they grow. Chiefs of large companies are turning to OKRs and CFRs as tools for culture change. And growing numbers of job seekers and career builders are making the right cultural fit their top criterion."

"What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop for a moment and shut out the noise. Close your eyes to really see what’s in front of you, and then pick the best way forward for you and…"

"exit for another job. They need to listen and capture signals as they are emitted. What if a goal-setting platform could pulse two or three questions to employees whenever they log in? What if it merged quantitative data on goal progress with qualitative input from frequent conversations and pulsing feedback?"

"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."

"OKRs and CFRs will build top-down alignment, team-first networking, and bottom-up autonomy and engagement—the pillars of any vibrant, value-driven culture."

"Goal setting and reflection, where the employee’s OKR plan is set for the coming cycle. The discussion focuses on how best to align individual objectives and key results with organizational priorities. Ongoing progress updates, the brief and data-driven check-ins on the employee’s real-time progress, with problem solving as needed.* Two-way coaching, to help contributors reach their potential and managers do a better job. Career growth, to develop skills, identify growth opportunities, and expand employees’ vision of their future at the company. Lightweight performance reviews, a feedback mechanism to gather inputs and summarize what the employee has accomplished since the last meeting, in the context of the organization’s needs. (As noted earlier, this conversation is held apart from an employee’s annual compensation/bonus review.)"

"How do companies define and build a positive culture? While I have no simple answer, OKRs and CFRs provide a blueprint. By aligning teams to work toward a handful of common objectives, then uniting them through lightweight, goal-oriented communications, OKRs and CFRs create transparency and accountability, the tent poles for sustained high performance. Healthy culture and structured goal setting are interdependent."

"For companies moving to continuous performance management, the first step is blunt and straightforward: Divorce compensation (both raises and bonuses) from OKRs. These should be two distinct conversations, with their own cadences and calendars. The first is a backward-looking assessment, typically held at year’s end. The second is an ongoing, forward-looking dialogue between leaders and contributors. It centers on five questions: What are you working on? How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along? Is there anything impeding your work? What do you need from me to be (more) successful? How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?"

"By scheduling regular Check-ins through the year, they keep their manager apprised of their progress against action items and goals from prior conversations, along with development needs and ideas for how they might grow. And now that we’ve done away with fixed pots of compensation, teammates are no longer competitors."

"Culture is the common language that allows for individuals in an organization to be sure they’re all talking about the same thing—and that what they’re talking about has meaning. Beyond that, culture establishes a common framework for decision making. In its absence, people are at a loss for how to make key functions replicable and scalable. Then there’s the more aspirational layer of culture: the values conversation. Who do we want to be as an organization? How do we want people to feel about their work, and about our product? What’s the impact we want to make on the world?"

"Old-school business models suggest that your role as an executive gets more abstract as you rise in the ranks. Your middle managers buffer you from the operational day-to-day, freeing you to focus on the big picture. Maybe that worked in a slower-paced era. But in my experience, OKRs can’t be effective unless the people at the top are unconditionally committed—like a religious calling. And proselytizing is hard and thankless work. Your people may not like you very much through the adoption curve, which can take up to a year. But it’s worth it."

"As companies transition to continuous performance management, OKRs and CFRs become mostly independent from compensation and formal evaluations."

"Scaling requires a system, with metrics. “What we choose to measure is a window into our values, and into what we value,” Dov says. “Because if you measure something, you’re telling people that it matters.”"

"Today’s workers “want to be ‘empowered’ and ‘inspired,’ not told what to do. They want to provide feedback to their managers, not wait for a year to receive feedback from their managers. They want to discuss their goals on a regular basis, share them with others, and track progress from peers.”"

"Most start-ups aren’t too eager to plunge into structured goal setting: We don’t need that. We go super-fast. We just figure stuff out. And often they do figure it out. But I think they’re missing an opportunity to teach people how to be executives before the company scales. If those habits aren’t ingrained early on, one of two things happens: Unsuccessful companies scale beyond the leadership team’s capacity, and they die. Successful companies scale beyond the team’s abilities and the team gets replaced. Those are…"

"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."

"The following April, we relaunched the platform with a sixty-day pilot program for a hundred employees in our operations group. Our senior vice president for operations and delivery, had his doubts going in. But with sharpened training, plus improvements to the software, he became an enthusiast. Within less than two weeks, he was shooting emails to the pilot group: Why did you write this objective that way? What’s the metric here? I don’t get this OKR, it isn’t what I’m seeing from client feedback. And his people were thinking, He’s paying attention! I’d better look at this more closely."

"To reach goals almost beyond imagining, people must be managed at a higher level. Our systems for workplace communication cry out for an upgrade. Just"

"When I ran OKRs for Larry, I sat in on four-hour meetings with his leadership team, where he’d debate all the company objectives and people were expected to be able to defend them and make sure they were clear. The guidance for OKRs at Google was often top-down, but with lots of discussion with experts on the team and significant give-and-take on key results: This is the direction we want to go, now tell us how you’re going to get there. Those long meetings enabled Larry to emphasize things he cared about, and also to vent frustrations, especially around service on our product OKRs. He’d say, “Tell me your speed now.” And then: “Why can’t you cut that in half?”"

"One proviso: When an objective gets dropped before the end of the OKR interval, it’s important to notify everyone depending on it. Then comes reflection: What did I learn that I didn’t foresee at the beginning of the quarter? And: How will I apply this lesson in the future?"

"The studies found that “stretched” workers were not only more productive, but more motivated and engaged: “Setting specific challenging goals is also a means of enhancing task interest and of helping people to discover the pleasurable aspects of an activity.”"

"OKR Shepherd For an OKR system to function effectively, the team deploying it—whether a group of top executives or an entire organization—must adopt it universally. No exceptions, no opt-outs. Yes, there will be late adopters, resisters, and garden-variety procrastinators. To prod them to join the flock, a best practice is to designate one or more OKR shepherds. For years, that role in Google’s products department was filled by senior vice president Jonathan Rosenberg. Here is one of Jonathan’s classic communiqués, with the laggards’ names deleted to protect the guilty: From: Jonathan Rosenberg Date: Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 2:59 PM Subject: Amidst boundless opportunities, 13 PMs whiff on OKRs (names included) Product Gang, As most of you know, I strongly believe that having a good set of quarterly OKRs is an important part of being successful at Google. That’s why I regularly send you notes reminding you to get them done on time, and why I ask managers to review them to make sure all of our OKRs are good. I’ve tried notes that are nice and notes that are mean. Personal favorites include threatening you with Jonathan’s Pit of Despair in October 07 and celebrating near perfection in July 08. Over time I iterated this carrot/stick approach until we reached near 100% compliance. Yay! So then I stopped sending notes, and look what happened: this quarter, SEVERAL of you didn’t get your OKRs done on time, and several others didn’t grade your Q2 OKRs. It turns out it’s not the type of note I send that matters, but the fact that I send anything at all! Names of the fallen are duly noted below (with a pass given to several AdMob employees who are new to the ways of Google, and to many of you who missed the deadline but still got them done in July). We have so many great opportunities before us (search, ads, display, YouTube, Android, enterprise, local, commerce, Chrome, TV, mobile, social . . .) that if you can’t come up with OKRs that get you excited about coming to work every day, then something must be wrong. In fact, if that’s really the case, come see me. In the meantime, please do your OKRs on time, grade your previous quarter’s OKRs, do a good job at it, and post them so that the OKR link from your moma [intranet] page works. This is not administrative busywork, it’s an important way to set your priorities for the quarter and ensure that we’re all working together. Jonathan"

"For a time we used a global health metric called Disability-Adjusted Life Years, or DALY. It gave us a data-driven framework for key results—say, to measure the impact of an investment in micronutrients against one to fight river blindness. DALY led us to focus on vaccines, which make such an enormous difference in productive life years. Now we had a credible metric, reinforced by our key results."

"my favorite definition of entrepreneurs: Those who do more than anyone thinks possible . . . with less than anyone thinks possible.*"

"Say the team’s objective is to recruit new customers, and your individual key result is fifty phone calls. You wind up calling thirty-five prospects, for a raw goal score of 70 percent. Did you succeed or fail? By itself, the data doesn’t afford us much insight. But if a dozen of your calls lasted several hours apiece and resulted in eight new customers, you might give yourself a perfect 1.0. Conversely: If you procrastinated, rushed through all fifty calls, and signed only one new customer, you might assess your performance at 0.25—because you could have pushed harder. (And on reflection: Should the key result have prioritized new customers, rather than calls?)"

"One underrated virtue of OKRs is that they can be tracked—and then revised or adapted as circumstances dictate. Unlike traditional, frozen, “set them and forget them” business goals, OKRs are living, breathing organisms."

"OKRs push us far beyond our comfort zones. They lead us to achievements on the border between abilities and dreams. They unearth fresh capacity, hatch more creative solutions, revolutionize business models. For companies seeking to live long and prosper, stretching to new heights is compulsory. 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"

"An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts."

"Two thousand design wins equated to one win per salesperson per month. Management was asking our field reps to triple their numbers for a chip so unpopular that longtime customers were hanging up on them. The sales force was beaten down and defeated, and now it stared up at Mount Everest. When I recently asked Bill Davidow about setting such a steep objective, he replied, “I picked the two thousand because I thought we needed a rallying point. And that was a rallying point.” The company incentivized the reps with a trip for two to Tahiti for all who reached the mark. Then Jim Lally added an ingenious stipulation: If a single individual failed to make the quota, the straggler’s entire district office would lose out on the trip. Early on, the numbers badly trailed the target, until the task force began to think about relaxing the design win criterion. But that summer, full-color Tahiti brochures mysteriously found their way into every salesperson’s home mailbox. By the third quarter, peer pressure on the laggards was enormous. At year’s end, the design win tally exceeded 2,300. The 8086 reigned supreme in the marketplace; Intel’s future was assured. Virtually the entire sales force went to Tahiti. And a stretch goal had made all the difference."

"In September 2011, I sent a provocative email to my boss and the YouTube leadership team. Subject line: “Watch time, and only watch time.” It was a call to rethink how we measured success: “All other things being equal, our goal is to increase [video] watch time.”"

"In a world where computing power is nearly limitless, “the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.”"

"Connected companies are quicker companies. To grab a competitive advantage, both leaders and contributors need to link up horizontally, breaking through barriers."