He wanted people at Google to be “uncomfortably excited.” He wanted us to have “a healthy disregard for the impossible.
Early on in your career, when you’re an individual contributor, you’re graded on the volume and quality of your work. Then one day, all of a sudden, you’re a manager. Let’s assume you do well and move up to manage more and more people. Now you’re no longer paid for the amount of work you do; you’re paid for the quality of decisions you make.
Then come the four OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch.
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.
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.
If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.
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.
Or as Larry Page would say, winning organizations need to “put more wood behind fewer arrows.