Here are some reflections for closing out an OKR cycle: Did I accomplish all of my objectives? If so, what contributed to my success? If not, what obstacles did I encounter? If I were to rewrite a goal achieved in full, what would I change? What have I learned that might alter my approach to the next cycle’s OKRs?
You’re not going to get the system just right the first time around. It’s not going to be perfect the second or third time, either. But don’t get discouraged. Persevere. You need to adapt it and make it your own.” Commitment feeds on itself. Stay the course with OKRs, as I know firsthand, and you will reap amazing benefits.
Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
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.
Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.
We must realize – and act on the realization – that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.
When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.
Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission.
Meritocracy flourishes in sunlight.
An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.
As Jim Collins observes in Good to Great, first you need to get “the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Only then do you turn the wheel and step on the gas.
Contributors are most engaged when they can actually see how their work contributes to the company’s success. Quarter to quarter, day to day, they look for tangible measures of their achievement. Extrinsic rewards – the year-end bonus check – merely validate what they already know. OKRs speak to something more powerful, the intrinsic value of the work itself.
Acute focus, open sharing, exacting measurement, a license to shoot for the moon – these are the hallmarks of modern goal science.
Stretch goals can be crushing if people don’t believe they’re achievable.
There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. – Andy Grove.
For a service business, nothing is more valuable than engaged employees who feel they can make a difference and want to stay with the organization. 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.
He wanted people at Google to be “uncomfortably excited.” He wanted us to have “a healthy disregard for the impossible.
The best way to solve a management problem, he believed, was through “creative confrontation” – by facing people “bluntly, directly, and unapologetically.
The art of management,” Grove wrote, “lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.
You can tell people to clean up a mess, but should you be telling them which broom to use? When top management was saying “We’ve got to crush Motorola!” somebody at the bottom might have said “Our benchmarks are lousy; I think I’ll write some better benchmarks.” That was how we worked.