OKR Goals & Performance Management Blog

In 2014 Rick Klau of Google Ventures presented a 90-minute YouTube video, titled How Google Sets Goals. Since then, nearly a half million business executives have viewed the video.

John Doerr introduced OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to Google back in 1999. In a ninety-minute presentation, he explained OKRs as:
“A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.”

No company has more experience or has enjoyed greater success with the OKR methodology than Google.

In his New York Times bestseller, “Measure What Matters”, author John Doerr relates several stories of organizations using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to achieve incredible results

Most companies have bold missions, aspirational visions, and aggressive strategic goals and objectives. Few companies’ missions, however, are as bold as Bono’s ONE Organization, “to change the world”.

Companies everywhere are seeking ways to improve the execution of their strategic objectives. The protocols vary from MBOs and KPIs, to BSC, to “waterfalls”, to OKRs and CFRs. The one thing each methodology has in common is the need for the right culture!

Chapter 19 of John Doerr’s “Measure What Matters” opens with one of my favorite quotes, “Culture, as the saying goes, eats strategy for breakfast.” It’s what makes meaning of work.

We’ve seen how well OKRs and CFRs can work when executed in a structured, scaled business.

Can you imagine continuing a corporate practice that devoted eighty thousand manager hours to an antiquated process that accomplished nothing more than to alienate employees and contribute to attrition?

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are an open platform, visible to all parts of an organization, at each level of every department.

OKRs are nothing without CFRs (Conversations, Feedback & Recognition with respect to your OKR goal progress).

Google has been using the OKR methodology for nearly twenty years. In the Forward to “Measure What Matters” by John Doerr, Larry Page states that “OKRs have led us to 10X results many times over.

“If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you will still achieve something remarkable.” Larry Page, co-founder of Google, from John Doerr’s book, “Measure What Matters”.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are adaptable. In “Measure What Matters” author John Doerr tells us that they work equally well for start-ups, companies scaling up, and large organizations.

Companies new to OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) all face initial challenges. Setting Objectives is easy; introduce a new product, meet your sales goal, secure X number of new users.

Gone are the days of MBOs and “set them and forget them”. The OKR methodology is designed so that Objectives and their Key Results can be tracked, graded, adapted, and improved upon over time.

Forward-looking organizations are researching OKR (Objectives and Key Results) implementations to gain a competitive edge in strategy execution.

One of the most sought benefits of implementing an OKR strategy is corporate alignment.

In his New York Times best-seller “Measure What Matters”, John Doerr defines OKRs as a powerful goal-setting methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses on the same important issues throughout the organization

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) compel senior management to identify those imperatives which will drive superior performance in their company. By the nature of their quarterly cadence of Objective setting, they force management to prioritize.