The key ideas

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

John Doerr, 2018

Why do some teams work hard and achieve little, while others turn a whole industry around in a year? John Doerr, an investor in Google, tells the story of a simple goal-setting system he took from Intel and brought to Google. Stories from Intel, Chrome, YouTube and startups show how to set goals you can check and that make people want to work for them.

Who it is for

For managers, founders and anyone who works in a team and is tired of goals that are forgotten within a month. And for those who want their personal plans for the year to survive until spring.

When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.

Forty people and one presentation

Autumn 1999. The venture capitalist John Doerr walks into the small office of a company he has just invested 12.5 million dollars in. It is the biggest bet of his career. The founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have strong technology and enormous ambitions, but no clear plan for turning them into work. The company has about forty people, and it's called Google.

Doerr shows them a simple scheme he once picked up from his boss at Intel. The objective is written in words, and next to it stand a few measurable results that show whether it has been reached or not. The scheme is called OKR. The founders decide to give it a try. Twenty years later Google employs more than seventy thousand people, and the scheme still underpins how the company sets its tasks.

Doerr published Measure What Matters in 2018. It isn't a textbook full of tables but a collection of stories: Intel, Google, YouTube, startups, the Gates Foundation. Many chapters are told by the people who were there. Over forty years Doerr has brought this system to more than fifty companies, and in the book he gathered what he saw. Its main idea fits into one line that Doerr repeats again and again: ideas are easy, execution is everything.

Next you'll see where this scheme came from, what a good goal looks like and why it's so easy to ruin. This knowledge will come in handy whether you lead a large team or just want to bring order to your own plans.

A goal without a number is just a wish

A wish sounds like this: "I want our customers to be happy." It's hard to argue with and impossible to check. At the end of the quarter, everyone will find a reason to believe it worked out.

Doerr suggests splitting a goal into two parts. The objective answers the question "what": where we want to get to. It is written in words and should be significant, concrete and inspiring. Key results answer the question "how will we know we've got there". There are usually three to five of them, and each has a deadline and a number.

Andrew Grove, the head of Intel from whom Doerr learned this, explained the point very simply. At the end of the period you can look at the result and answer without any argument whether it was done or not. Yes or no. Marissa Mayer, who worked at Google, put it even more briefly: if it doesn't have a number, it's not a key result.

Doerr advises testing yourself with a formula: "I will achieve this objective, as measured by these key results." Compare "Make the service easier to use" with "Make the service easier to use, as measured by checkout time dropping from five minutes to two." In the second case the team knows at once where to put its effort.

There's something else that matters. A key result describes an outcome, not an activity. "Hold ten meetings" shows that people were busy. "Sign three contracts" shows that something has changed.

Read in Livria

About the author

John Doerr is a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, the firm that invested in Google and Amazon. He started out as an engineer at Intel under Andrew Grove.

All books by this author: John Doerr

Terms from the book

  • Mayer
  • Intel
  • IBM
  • Page
  • Brin
  • Drucker
  • Morris
  • Grove
  • Gates
  • YouTube
  • OKR
  • Google: An American technology company founded in 1998. One of the first companies Doerr brought OKRs to, and it still uses them.
  • Motorola: An American electronics maker. In the late 1970s its 68000 processor was the main rival to Intel's processor.
  • processor: The main chip of a computer, the one that does the calculations.
  • Operation Crush: Intel's 1980 campaign against Motorola. The word crush means to flatten completely.
  • Remind: An American messaging service connecting teachers with students and parents.
  • Kopf: Brett Kopf, who co-founded Remind with his brother David.
  • Jini Kim: The founder of Nuna, a company that works with healthcare data.
  • Medicaid: A US government health insurance programme for people on low incomes.
  • Nuna: An American company that builds systems for working with healthcare data.
  • MyFitnessPal: An app for counting calories and tracking what you eat.
  • Fitbit: A company that makes fitness trackers and smartwatches.
  • Mike Lee: Co-founder of MyFitnessPal with his brother Albert Lee.
  • Pichai: Sundar Pichai led the creation of the Chrome browser and later became CEO of Google.
  • Chrome: Google's web browser, released in 2008.
  • Goodrow: Cristos Goodrow, a YouTube engineer who proposed measuring success by watch time rather than by the number of views.
  • Mehrotra: Shishir Mehrotra, at the time one of YouTube's leaders.
  • Ford Pinto: A small Ford car from the early 1970s. It became known for its safety problems.
  • Iacocca: Lee Iacocca (1924–2019), an American car executive, one of the leaders of Ford, later head of Chrysler.
  • Adobe: An American company that makes software for design and for working with documents.
  • CFR: Doerr's term: Conversations, Feedback, Recognition. A manager's ongoing work with people, paired with OKRs.

All terms

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