John Doerr on OKRs and Measuring What Matters

🏀 John Doerr's success as a venture capitalist seriously understates his impact, having backed some of the most successful technology firms ever. 🎯 OKRs stand for objectives and key results, and it's a deceptively simple goal-setting system that was invented in the s by one of the greatest managers of his or any other era, Dr. Andy Grove. 🎯 Andy Grove believed that "it almost doesn't matter what you know. It’s execution that's everything." 📈 If you're achieving all of your goals, you're probably not stretching far enough or hard enough, according to Google's management judgment. 🤔 "The fundamental question is, is it okay to fail? Do you have a risk-taking culture?" 🥇 John Doerr argues for an alternative approach to motivation and execution in organizations. 🌐 The notion of transparent and self-graded goals in organizations is radical and uncomfortable for many, but it leads to higher performance and intrinsic motivation. 🌍 Powerful organizations have a clear actionable, long-lived mission and value statement, like Facebook's "Let's just connect the whole world" or Google's "Organize all the world's information and make it readily available to anyone, anywhere, anytime."