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.
So I’d come to a philosophy, my mantra: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses.
Innovation tends to dwell less at the center of an organization than at its edges.
For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.
People are the most important thing that we do. We have to try to make them better.
As Stephen Covey noted, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.
If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.
What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop for a moment and shut out the noise. Close your eyes to really see what’s in front of you, and then pick the best way forward for you and your team, relative to the organization’s needs.
We use OKRs to plan what people are going to produce, track their progress vs. plan, and coordinate priorities and milestones between people and teams. We also use OKRs to help people stay focused on the most important goals, and help them avoid being distracted by urgent but less important goals.
Actions – and data – speak louder than words.
Individuals want to drive their own success. They don’t want to wait till the end of the year to be graded. They want to know how they’re doing while they’re doing it, and also what they need to do differently.
If an objective is well framed, three to five KRs will usually be adequate to reach it.
When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.
For each objective, settle on no more than five measurable, unambiguous, time-bound key results – how the objective will be attained. By definition, completion of all key results equates to the attainment of the objective.
Encourage a healthy proportion of bottom-up OKRs – roughly half. Smash departmental silos by connecting teams with horizontally shared OKRs. Cross-functional operations enable quick and coordinated decisions, the basis for seizing a competitive advantage. Make all lateral, cross-functional dependencies explicit.
Bono, do you know the Senegalese proverb ‘If you want to cut a man’s hair, it is better if he is in the room’?” He said it in a loving way, but we didn’t miss the message: Be careful if you think you know what we want. Because we know what we want. You’re not African, and this messiah complex hasn’t always turned out so well.
First, said Edwin Locke, “hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.
Or as Larry Page would say, winning organizations need to “put more wood behind fewer arrows.
Peak performance is the product of collaboration and accountability.
Transparency seeds collaboration.