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

6. Commit: The Nuna Story, pg 69

Jini Kim Cofounder and CEO

When we still had no orders in year two, I knew it was time to get an education. What did meaningful innovation look like in the health care market? I put on a suit and crashed some human resources conferences to find out.

To inspire true commitment, leaders must practise what they teach. They must model the behaviour they expect of others.

By definition, startups wrestle with ambiguity. Therefore, the whole team needs sharper focus and clearer priorities, the prerequisites for deeper commitment.

Most of all, we want the Nuna platform to play a big role in improving the nation’s health care. It’s a daunting commitment. But as I learned at Google: The hairier the mission, the more important your OKRs.

7. Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork, pg 77

We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. — Steve Jobs

According to the Harvard Business Review, companies with highly aligned employees are more than twice as likely to be top performers.

.. And it’s really hard for employees to see what they should work on first. Everything seems important; everything seems urgent. But what really needs to get done? The answer lies in focused, transparent OKRs. They knit each individual’s work to team efforts, departmental projects, and the overall mission.

For the org chart in pg. 84, Now, what’s wrong with this picture? Here’s a clue. The SVPs key results are a mess. Unlike the head coach’s KRs, they’re unmeasurable. They’re not specific or time bound. When objectives are cascaded, the process can degrade into a mechanical, color-by-numbers exercise, with four adverse effects:

  • A loss of agility
  • A lack of flexibility
  • Marginalized contributors
  • One-dimensional linkages

Fortunately, there’s an alternative, Bottoms Up!. The antithesis of cascading might be Google’s “20 percent time”, which frees engineers to work on side projects for the equivalent of one day per week. People who choose their destination will own a deeper awareness of what it takes to get there. Cross-functional Coordination

8. Align: The MyFitnessPal Story, pg 90

Mike Lee Cofounder and CEO

In 2013, as we jumped from 10 to 30 people, I assumed we’d become 200% more productive. I’d underestimated how much scaling can slow you down. New engineers need extensive training before they can be as proficient as your holdovers. And with multiple engineers developing the same project, we had to build new processes to keep them from overriding one another. In the transition, productivity took a hit.

Alignment doesn’t mean redundancy. At MyFitnessPal, every OKR has a single owner. Co-ownership weakens accountability. If an OKR fails, you don’t want 2 people blaming each other.

When the company was acquired by Under Armour. First, we had to define our capacity constraints. Then we had to clarify our core priorities. People began to recognize our limits and adjust their expectations accordingly.

9. Connect: The Intuit Story, pg 102

Atticus Tysen Chief Information Officer

Modern IT goes way beyond checking off boxes to process help tickets or change requests. It’s about adding value to the business, shedding redundant clone systems, creating new functionality, finding future-oriented solutions.

10. Superpower #3: Track for Accountability, pg 113

In God we trust; all others must bring data. — W. Edwards Deming

OKRs, their life cycle unfolds in three phases:

  • The Setup
  • Midlife Tracking
  • Wrap-up: Rinse and Repeat

The Setup

In 2014, when Bill Pence came to AOL as global CTO, .. Pence says. Without frequent status updates, goals slide into irrelevance; the gap between plan and reality widens by the day. Its good to have a cloud based OKR system for transparency & real time feedback. To avoid resistance, designating OKR shepherds would be ideal.

Midlife Tracking

As the Fitbit craze attests, people crave to know how they are progressing and see it visually represented, down to the percentage point.

As we track and audit our OKRs, we have four options at any point in the cycle:

  • Continue - goal isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
  • Update - modify a yellow zone “needs attention” to get the goal on track.
  • Start - launch a new OKR mid-cycle.
  • Stop - a red zone “at risk”, goal has outlived its usefulness, maybe drop it.

Wrap-up: Rinse and Repeat

Scoring

The simplest, cleanest way to score an objective is by averaging the percentage completion rates of its associated key results. Google uses a scale of 0 to 1.0:

  • 0.7 to 1.0 = green.* (We delivered)
  • 0.4 to 0.6 = yellow. (We made progress but fell short)
  • 0.0 to 0.3 = red. (We failed to make real progress)

Self-assessment

In evaluating OKR perfomance, objective data is enhanced by the goal setter’s thoughtful, subjective judgement.

Reflection

The philosopher and educator John Dewey said, “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience”. OKR wrap-ups are retrospective and forward-looking at the same time.

11. Track: The Gates Foundation Story, pg 126

Bill Gates Cochairman

Patty Stonesifer Former CEO

There were two cases where I turned down a grant in the end because the goals weren’t clear enough. When a goal is too aspirational, it’s bad for credibility.

Courtesy of the Gates Foundation, the Guinea worm disease, Dracunculiasis, its scientific name, is now expected to become the second disease in human history to be eradicated, after smallpox which was eradicated in 1980. In 2015, the number of reported cases was 22.

According to Patty Stonesifer, setting the big goals wasn’t as hard as breaking them down: What rocks need to moved to achieve them?

Case in point: the ongoing fight against the most lethal animal on the planet, the mosquito. Driven by empirical data, focus has been shifted from a transmission-blocking vaccine to a comprehensive eradication strategy.

Objective: Global eradication of malaria by 2040

Key Results

  1. Prove to the world that a radical cure-based approach can lead to regional elimination.
  2. Prepare for scale-up by creating the necessary tools—SERCAP (Single Exposure Radical Cure and Prophylaxis) Diagnostic.
  3. Sustain current global progress to ensure the environment is conducive to eradication push.

12. Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing, pg 133

The biggest risk of all is not taking one. — Melody Hobson

Jim Collin’s memorable phrase in Good to Great—spark leaps to new levels:

A BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is a huge and daunting goal–like a big mountain to climb. It is clear, compelling, and people “get it” right away. A BHAG serves as a unifying focal point of effort, galvanizing people and creating team spirit as people strive toward a finish line. Like the 1960s NASA moon mission, a BHAG captures the imagination and grabs people in the gut.

13. Stretch: The Google Chrome Story, pg 143

Sundar Pichai CEO

In 2004, he joined Google as a Product Manager when the company still revolved around search.

In 2008, the year of Chrome’s rollout, Sundar Pichai was Google’s Vice President of product development.

In October 2015, at age 43, he became Google’s third CEO.

Our stretch OKR gave the team direction and a barometer to measure our progress. It made complacency impossible. And it kept us all rethinking, every day, the framework for what we were doing.

Google stands for speed. The company has waged a constant battle against latency. In 2008, Larry and Sergey wrote a beautiful OKR that captured people’s attention: “We should make the web as fast as flipping through a magazine.” For the Chrome project, we created a sub-OKR to turbocharge Javascript. We set a moonshot goal of 10x improvement and named the project “V8”, after the high-perfomance car engine.

”..I tried to be thoughtful and systematic and not too emotional, and I think that helped.” Google is propelled by our moonshot culture. “..Whenever we invent something new at Google, we’re always thinking: How can we scale it to a billion?” That number can seem very abstract. But when you set a measurable objective for the year and chunk the problem, quarter by quarter, monshots become doable.

14. Stretch: The YouTube Story, pg 154

Susan Wojcicki CEO

Cristos Goodrow Vice President of Engineering

…and once you break, it’s not easy to reaccelerate.

Susan had risen to Senior VP of advertising and commerce, where she reimagined AdWords and envisioned a new way to monetize the web with AdSense.

In long OKR meetings, Larry would empasize on things he cared about, and also vent frustrations… He’d say, “Tell me your speed now.” And then: “Why can’t you cut that in half?”

Company rule for product development: Make it fast.

Cristos Goodrow: Engineers struggle with goal setting in two big ways. They hate crossing off anything they think is a good idea, and they habitually underestimate how long it takes to get things done.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has pointed out: In a world where computing power is nearly limitless, “the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.” Our true currency wasn’t views or clicks–it was watch time. The logic was undeniable. Youtube needed a new core metric.

Youtube had a mega stretch goal of reaching 1 billion hours of watch time per day by 2016. By Feb 2014, when Susan joined, it was nearly a third of the way through. In 2007, this was when google introduced AdSense to monetize the whole web.

Susan: Aspirational goals can prompt a reset for the entire org. In our case, it inspired infrastructure initiatives throughout Youtube. People started saying, “If we’re going to be that big, maybe we need to redesign our architecture. Maybe we need to redesign our storage.” It became a prod for the whole company to better prepare for the future. Everybody started thinking bigger.

Part Two: The New World of Work.

15. Continuous Perfomance Management: OKRs and CFRs, pg 175

Talking can transform minds, which can transform behaviors, which can transform institutions. — Sherly Sandberg

The contemporary alternative to annual perfomance reviews , is continous perfomance management. It is implemented with an instrument called CFRs. Conversations, Feedback, Recognition

Conversation

Andy Grove believed that the subordinate should do 90% of the talking. Progress updates entail two basic questions: What’s working well? What’s not working well?

Recognition

  • Institute peer-to-peer recognition
  • Establish clear criteria
  • Share recognition stories
  • Make recognition frequent and attainable
  • Tie recognition to company goals and strategies.

16. Ditching Annual Perfomance Reviews: The Adobe Story, pg 189

Donna Morris Executive Vice President, Customer and Employee Experience

At Adobe, managers are trained to scale compensation based on employees’ perfomance, their impact on the business, the relative scarcity of their skills, and market conditions. There are no fixed guidelines.

Turnover is costly. The best turnover is internal turnover, where people are growing their careers within your enterprise rather than moving someplace else. People aren’t wired to be nomads. They just need to find a place where they feel they can make a real impact. At Adobe, Check-in is making that happen.

17. Baking Better Every Day: The Zume Pizza Story, pg 197

Julia Collins and Alex Garden Cofounders and Co-CEOs