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.

— John Doerr

John Doerr Quotes

So I’d come to a philosophy, my mantra: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

— John E. Doerr

Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses.

— John E. Doerr

Innovation tends to dwell less at the center of an organization than at its edges.

— John Doerr

For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.

— John Doerr

People are the most important thing that we do. We have to try to make them better.

— John Doerr

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.

— John Doerr

If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.

— John E. Doerr

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.

— John Doerr

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.

— John Doerr

Actions – and data – speak louder than words.

— John Doerr

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.

— John Doerr

If an objective is well framed, three to five KRs will usually be adequate to reach it.

— John Doerr

When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.

— John Doerr

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.

— John E. Doerr

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.

— John E. Doerr

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.

— John Doerr

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.

— John Doerr

Or as Larry Page would say, winning organizations need to “put more wood behind fewer arrows.

— John E. Doerr

Peak performance is the product of collaboration and accountability.

— John Doerr

Transparency seeds collaboration.

— John Doerr
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