OKRs Explained, with John Doerr

Hi, I’m John Doerr, the Chairman of Kleiner Perkins and author of Measure What Matters.

I’m happy that you’ve come to WhatMatters.com and want to learn more about how to apply Objectives and Key Results to your work.

After taking this course, you will understand how to identify “what matters” and how to set and achieve audacious goals.

Early on in my career, I worked at a semiconductor chip company by the name of Intel. They had just started Intel University and I somehow found my way – lucky me – into the inaugural course, taught by the company’s legendary leader, Andy Grove, “the Father of OKRs.” Andy’s approach to goal-setting and his refinement of OKRs led to Intel’s historic growth and its pioneering advances in microchip technology.

Andy was running a company where tens of thousands of people were expected to etch a million lines of silicon within one micron of accuracy – or else nothing else would work at all. It was an enterprise that required incredible discipline, alignment, focus, and commitment.

I’ll never forget the time Andy said to me, “John, it almost doesn’t matter what you know. What matters is what you do.”

That is so true.

Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

Or as Thomas Edison once said: “Innovation without execution is hallucination.”

So for many years now, I’ve been the Johnny Appleseed of OKRs. They are Andy Grove’s invention, but I’m the messenger. I’ve seen them fuel growth, spark creativity, and – best of all – help people avoid fuzzy thinking.

Simply put, I love to see good ideas and their teams succeed.

Our biggest problems today need big solutions.

Probably no organization has embraced OKRs more thoroughly than Google. In 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were just 24 years old, I gave them my OKR pitch.

At the end of it, I asked them, “So guys, what do you think?”

And Sergey responded, “Well, we don’t have any better way to manage the company so we might as well give this a try…” Which I took as a ringing endorsement!

Because here’s what’s happened since. Every quarter, every Googler – that’s 190,000 of them – takes the company’s annual OKRs and uses them to write their own personal Objectives and Key Results. They’re posted on an internal website that anyone can see, they’re tracked and graded. And then those OKRs are swept aside as a new cycle begins.

Because they’re not used for bonuses. They’re not used for promotions. Instead they’re used for a higher purpose – they’re a social contract that gets everyone at Google collectively aligned around the few things that really matter.

I like to think of OKRs as transparent vessels that contain the “what” and the “how” of our ambitions. But we also need to understand the “why” in choosing our OKRs. Truly transformational teams link their ambitions to their passions and their purpose. In doing so, they develop a clear and compelling sense of why.

Now, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They won’t substitute for good judgment and a strong culture. But when those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can take you to the mountaintop.

Let’s get started!