This book made one of the greatest appearances in 2018.
It was as if the apostle were sharing his take on the Objectives & Key Results methodology, widely embraced today in businesses around the world.
John Doerr, in fact, may be the main apostle of it. Having worked directly with Andy Grove, who created OKRs, he spread the news while being an investor in many companies in Silicon Valley. Most famously, he did so in 1999 for Google, when he presented Page and Brin with it.
OKRs’ spirit: Objectives beats Structure
Brin immediately recognized OKRs’ power and benefits… or not so much:
Well, we need to have some organizing principle. We don’t have one, and this might as well be it.
From then on, Google really became an OKR powerhouse, fostering growth by the use of very ambitious objectives and measurable key results.
The ambitious side of OKRs is the one that many times can give you a sense of how much a company is able to organize for growth.
Inevitably, implementing OKRs will start with the focus on the process:
- how to define your OKRs
- transforming tasks into results/outcome
- how to follow up
- grading
- and solving for dependencies, just to name a few.
But while you are learning and covering these— which could take you a couple of quarters depending on the size of the team — you will start feeling something else needs to change: your structure.
As a team, you begin by setting objectives, which in turn trigger the creation of strategies to get after them, which will eventually make you think about the structure.
Here’s where the flat structure of Google enabled its growth.
Management theory’s common rule is that 7 is the maximum number of direct reports a person should have.
At Google, generally 7 is the minimum, with the famous example of Jonathan Rosenberg, Sr VP of Products, with 20.
OKRs are very well suited for multi-disciplinary teams working towards a common objective, and not just people sitting together, gathered from different departments.
One objective, one team.
People within the same discipline, that could belong to the same department, can find space-time to gather and share best practices, just like you find time to clear your gear when you are not engaged in the battle.
The book — a very good collection of leaders’ thinking
The book is somehow strange in that it consists of chapters written by OKRs practitioners of different companies that will show you nuances in the way they are applied.
The stories told by executives contain many insights helpful to leaders at all levels. You will feel at home reading inner strugglings of CEOs, and how they handle themselves in driving their companies forward.
There are many good lessons in the book, among which I highlight these:
1. Management commitment and planning are a deal-breaker.
In Google’s early years, Larry Page set aside two days per quarter to personally scrutinize the OKRs for each and every software engineer. […] As the company expanded, Larry continued to kick off each quarter with a marathon debate on his leadership team’s objectives.
This is an extremely valuable insight from Google. Typically OKRs end being a closed conversation between an employee and his boss, avoiding the opportunity to work cross-boundaries and share OKRs with colleagues.
Also, there are two very clear examples of executives prompting their teams to either grade their OKRs or define their new ones.
It is an absolutely necessary job leaders must embrace. Most people don’t naturally stop, reflect and assess their past period, and they don’t stop and think clearly about what should the outcome be in the following one.
2. Don’t link OKRs to performance.
Says Andy Grove:
The OKR system is meant to pace a person — to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.
If performance is only tied to results, you will be only looking at one dimension of a person’s contribution. Other extremely relevant dimensions involve new acquired knowledge, team-building, etc.
OKRs are the direction along which all dimensions should grow.
3. OKRs are top-down & bottom-up.
Doerr says:
Innovation tends to dwell less at the center of an organization than at its edges. The most powerful OKRs typically stem from insights outside the C-suite. As Andy Grove observed, “People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early. Salespeople understand shifting customer demands before management does; financial analysts are the earliest to know when the fundamentals of a business change.
It is an excellent book in that it will help you learn more about OKRs.
As an OKR implementation guide, it lacks structure and I think this was not Doerr’s main objective. You can find many resources online to help you with it.
In the last chapters, John provides very practical recommendations any leader can use with its team.
Doerr writes:
…perhaps no organization, not even Intel, has scaled OKRs more effectively than Google. […] We’re not just making some list and checking it twice. We’re building our capacity, our goal muscle, and there is always some pain for meaningful gain. Yet Google’s leaders have never faltered. Their hunger for learning and improving remains insatiable.
OKRs became the “simple tool that institutionalized the founders’ ‘think big’ ethos”.