John Doerr - Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

Measure What Matters takes you behind the scenes for the creation of Intels powerful OKR systemone of Andy Groves finest legacies.

Gordon Moore, cofounder and former chairman of Intel

Measure What Matters will transform your approach to setting goals for yourself and your organization. Whether you are in a small start-up, or large global company, John Doerr pushes every leader to think deeply about creating a focused, purpose-driven business environment.

Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments

John Doerr is a Silicon Valley legend. He explains how transparently setting objectives and defining key results can align organizations and motivate high performance.

Jonathan Levin, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business

Measure What Matters is a gift to every leader or entrepreneur who wants a more transparent, accountable, and effective team. It encourages the kind of big, bold bets that can transform an organization.

John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco

In addition to being a terrific personal history of tech in Silicon Valley, Measure What Matters is an essential handbook for both small and large organizations; the methods described will definitely drive great execution.

Diane Greene, founder and CEO of VMware, Alphabet board member, and CEO of Google Cloud

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Doerr, John E., author.

Title: Measure what matters : how Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation rock the world with OKRs / John Doerr.

Description: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018002727| ISBN 9780525536222 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525536239 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Business planning. | Performance. | Goal (Psychology) | Organizational effectiveness.

Classification: LCC HD30.28 .D634 2018 | DDC 658.4/012dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002727

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Version_2

For Ann, Mary, and Esther and the wonder of their unconditional love

FOREWORD

Larry Page

Alphabet CEO and Google Cofounder

I wish I had had this book nineteen years ago, when we founded Google. Or even before that, when I was only managing myself! As much as I hate process, good ideas with great execution are how you make magic. And thats where OKRs come in.

John Doerr showed up one day in 1999 and delivered a lecture to us on objectives and key results, and how we should run the company based on his experience at Intel. We knew Intel was run well, and Johns talk made a lot of intuitive sense, so we decided wed give it a try. I think its worked out pretty well for us.

OKRs are a simple process that helps drive varied organizations forward. We have adapted how we use it over the years. Take it as a blueprint and make it yours, based on what you want to see happen!

For leaders, OKRs give a lot of visibility into an organization. They also provide a productive way to push back. For example, you might ask: Why cant users load a video on YouTube almost instantly? Isnt that more important than this other goal youre planning to do next quarter?

Im glad to join in celebrating the memory of Bill Campbell, which John has done very nicely at the conclusion of the book. Bill was a fantastically warm human being who had the gift of almost always being rightespecially about people. He was not afraid to tell anyone about how full of shit they were, and somehow they would still like him even after that. I miss Bills weekly haranguing very much. May everyone have a Bill Campbell in their livesor even strive to make themselves be a bit more like the Coach!

I dont write a lot of forewords. But I agreed to do this one because John gave Google a tremendous gift all those years ago. OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. Theyve helped make our crazily bold mission of organizing the worlds information perhaps even achievable. Theyve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most. And I wanted to make sure people heard that.

Larry Page and John Doerr, 2014.

PART ONE

OKRs in Action

1

Google, Meet OKRs

If you dont know where youre going, you might not get there.

Yogi Berra

On a fall day in 1999, in the heart of Silicon Valley, I arrived at a two-story, L-shaped structure off the 101 freeway. It was young Googles headquarters, and Id come with a gift.

The company had leased the building two months earlier, outgrowing a space above an ice-cream parlor in downtown Palo Alto. Two months before that, Id placed my biggest bet in nineteen years as a venture capitalist, an $11.8 million wager for 12 percent of a start-up founded by a pair of Stanford grad school dropouts. I joined Googles board. I was committed, financially and emotionally, to do all I could to help it succeed.

Barely a year after incorporating, Google had planted its flag: to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. That might have sounded grandiose, but I had confidence in Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They were self-assured, even brash, but also curious and thoughtful. They listenedand they delivered.

Sergey was exuberant, mercurial, strongly opinionated, and able to leap intellectual chasms in a single bound. A Soviet-born immigrant, he was a canny, creative negotiator and a principled leader. Sergey was restless, always pushing for more; he might drop to the floor in the middle of a meeting for a set of push-ups.

Larry was an engineers engineer, the son of a computer science pioneer. He was a soft-spoken nonconformist, a rebel with a 10x cause: to make the internet exponentially more relevant. While Sergey crafted the commerce of technology, Larry toiled on the product and imagined the impossible. He was a blue-sky thinker with his feet on the ground.

Earlier that year, when the two of them came to my office to pitch me, their PowerPoint deck had just seventeen slidesand only two with numbers. (They added three cartoons just to flesh out the deck.) Though theyd made a small deal with the