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

Doerr, John

 
9780525536222: Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525536221 ISBN 13: 9780525536222
Verlag: Portfolio, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

#1 New York Times Bestseller

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive.

In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered.

Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked.

In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.

The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Doerr is an engineer, acclaimed venture capitalist, and the chairman of Kleiner Perkins. He was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create more than half a million jobs and the world's second and third most valuable companies. He's passionate about encouraging leaders to reimagine the future, from transforming healthcare to advancing applications of machine learning. Outside of Kleiner Perkins, John works with social entrepreneurs for change in public education, the climate crisis, and global poverty. John serves on the board of the Obama Foundation and ONE.org.

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1

Google, Meet OKRs

If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there.

—Yogi Berra

On a fall day in 1999, in the heart of Silicon Valley, I arrived at a two-story, L-shaped structure off the 101 freeway. It was young Google's headquarters, and I'd come with a gift.

The company had leased the building two months earlier, outgrowing a space above an ice-cream parlor in downtown Palo Alto. Two months before that, I'd placed my biggest bet in nineteen years as a venture capitalist, an $11.8 million wager for 12 percent of a start-up by a pair of Stanford grad school dropouts. I joined Google's board. I was committed, financially and emotionally, to do all I could to help it succeed.

Barely a year after incorporating, Google had planted its flag: to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That might have sounded grandiose, but I had confidence in Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They were self-assured, even brash, but also curious and thoughtful. They listened—and they delivered.

Sergey was exuberant, mercurial, strongly opinionated, and able to leap intellectual chasms in a single bound. A Soviet-born immigrant, he was a canny, creative negotiator and a principled leader. Sergey was restless, always pushing for more; he might drop to the floor mid-meeting for a set of push-ups.

Larry was an engineer's engineer, the son of a computer science pioneer. He was a soft-spoken nonconformist, a rebel with a 10x cause: to make the internet exponentially more relevant. While Sergey crafted the commerce of technology, Larry toiled on the product and imagined the impossible. He was a blue-sky thinker with his feet on the ground.

Earlier that year, when the two of them came to my office to pitch me, their PowerPoint deck had just seventeen slides-and only two with numbers. (They added three cartoons just to flesh out the deck.) Though they'd made a small deal with the Washington Post, Google had yet to unlock the value of keyword-targeted ads. As the eighteenth search engine to arrive on the web, the company was way late to the party. Ceding the competition such a long head start was normally fatal, especially in technology.

But none of that stopped Larry from lecturing me on the poor quality of search in the market, and how much it could be improved, and how much bigger it would be tomorrow. He and Sergey had no doubt they would break through, never mind their lack of a business plan. Their PageRank algorithm was that much better than the competition, even in beta testing.

I asked them, "How big do you think this could be?" I'd already made my private calculation: If everything broke right, Google might reach a market cap of $1 billion. But I wanted to gauge their dreams.

And Larry responded, "Ten billion dollars."

Just to be sure, I said, "You mean market cap, right?"

And Larry shot back, "No, I don't mean market cap. I mean revenue."

I was floored. Assuming a normal growth rate for a profitable tech firm, $10 billion in revenue would imply a $100 billion market capitalization. That was the province of Microsoft and IBM and Intel. That was a creature rarer than a unicorn. There was no braggadocio to Larry, only calm, considered judgment. I didn't debate him; I was genuinely impressed. He and Sergey were determined to change the world, and I believed they had a shot.

Long before Gmail or Android or Chrome, Google brimmed with big ideas. The founders were quintessential visionaries, with extreme entrepreneurial energy. What they lacked was management experience. For Google to have real impact, or even to reach liftoff, they would have to learn to make tough choices and keep their team on track. Given their healthy appetite for risk, they'd need to pull the plug on losers-to fail fast.

Not least, they would need timely, relevant data. To track their progress. To measure what mattered.

And so: On that balmy day in Mountain View, I came with my present for Google, a sharp-edged tool for world-class execution. I'd first used it in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where Andy Grove, the greatest manager of his or any era, drove the best-run company I had ever seen. Since joining Kleiner Perkins, the Menlo Park VC firm, I had proselytized Grove's gospel far and wide, to fifty companies or more.

To be clear, I have the utmost reverence for entrepreneurs. I'm an inveterate techie who worships at the altar of innovation. But I'd also watched too many start-ups struggle with growth and scale and getting the right things done. So I'd come to a philosophy, a mantra:

Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

In the early 1980s, I took a fourteen-month sabbatical from Kleiner to lead the desktop division at Sun Microsystems. Suddenly I found myself in charge of hundreds of people. I was terrified. Andy Grove's system was my bastion in a storm, a source of clarity in every meeting I led. It empowered my executive team and rallied the whole operation. Yes, we made our share of mistakes. But we also achieved amazing things, including a new RISC microprocessor architecture to secure Sun's lead in the workstation market. That was my personal proof point for what I was bringing, all these years later, to Google.

The practice that molded me at Intel and saved me at Sun-that still inspires me today-is called OKRs. Short for Objectives and Key Results, it's a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. Now, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They cannot substitute sound judgment, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop.

Larry and Sergey—with Marissa Mayer, Susan Wojcicki, Salar Kamangar, and thirty or so others, pretty much the whole company at the time—gathered to hear me out. They stood around the ping-pong table (which doubled as their boardroom table), or sprawled in beanbag chairs, dormitory style. My first PowerPoint slide defined OKRs: "A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization."

An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they're a vaccine against fuzzy thinking-and fuzzy execution.

KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, "It's not a key result unless it has a number.") You either meet a key result's requirements or you don't; there is no gray area, no room for doubt. At the end of the designated period, typically a quarter, we declare the key result fulfilled or not. Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. (And if it isn't, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)

My objective that day, I told the band of young Googlers, was to build a planning model for their company, as measured by three key results:

KR #1: I would finish my presentation on time.

KR #2: We'd create a sample set of quarterly Google OKRs.

KR #3: I'd gain management agreement for a three-month OKR trial.

By way of illustration, I sketched two OKR scenarios. The first involved a fictional football team whose general manager cascades a top-level objective down through the franchise org chart. The second was a real-life drama to which I'd had a ringside seat: Operation Crush, the campaign to restore Intel's dominance in the...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525536221
ISBN 13 
9780525536222
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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Osnabrück
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Deutschland

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