John Doerr was an electrical engineer who started at Andy Grove’s Intel, which he left to become one of the most successful venture capitalists in America. He has backed Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Google, Netscape, Twitter, Slack, and other successful tech businesses.
Doerr took Andy Grove’s objectives and key results (OKRs) management tool with him and introduced it to Sun Microsystems in 1980 and a startup called Google in 1999. From there, it grew into a standard management staple of Silicon Valley.
OKRs are a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals.
- The first part of OKRs, objectives, represent what you want to do (launch a killer game!);
- key results (KRs) are how you know whether you’ve achieved them (downloads of 25K/day, revenue of $50K/day).
Effective key results are specific, time-bound, aggressive yet realistic, measurable, and verifiable. Whereas objectives can be long-lived, lasting for a year or longer, key results change as the work progresses.
An effective goal management system links goals to a team’s broader mission. It moves people to strive for what might seem beyond reach. For larger companies, OKRs become the themes of the quarter, set by the top management team and cascaded to the organization.
Company OKRs a;low teams and individuals lower down in the organization to establish their own OKRs that contribute to the quarterly themes. Google makes all OKRs transparent to everyone in the organization, creating accountability and clarity. Everyone is privy to what everyone else is working on and…
