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

In the Fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up he'd just given nearly $12 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world, or even survive, Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They had to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. They needed timely, relevant data to track their progress - to measure what mattered. 

Doerr introduced them to a proven approach to operating excellence - Objectives and Key Results. The rest is history. With OKRs as its management foundation, Google has grown from forty employees to more than 70,000 - with a market cap exceeding $700 billion.

Doerr first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company he had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked.

In the OKR model, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how these top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions and within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry-level contributors to the CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.

The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They link objectives across departments to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost performance and retention.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

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