Measure What Matters — Book Review & Quotes

Review

There is a shift in the way companies are managing themselves — quantifiable measurements of success have almost always been in vogue, but aligning those measurements to outcomes is critical. Objectives, and Key Results represent a methodology of identifying what you want to accomplish, and how you’ll observe those things over time.

“To paraphrase Voltaire: Don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of good. Or as Sheryl Sandberg says: ‘Done is better than perfect.’”

A key takeaway of this book for me revolved around an elusive concept of ‘cultural humility.’ In my short professional career I have seen a frequent pattern crop up — people struggle to take constructive criticism very well. When I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, there was an unspoken culture of humility; we recognized that we were all trying to be better people and when we spent time with our superiors, we would vigorously ask for feedback on ways we could improve.

There are a lot of people that I’ve worked with or around that think about feedback as much the opposite. I’ve had conversations where I offer encouragement in the form of suggestions. Many people’s first reaction to that is defend the way they were doing things, even if they were just complaining about how it never worked.

“Corrective feedback is naturally difficult for people. But when done well, it’s also the greatest gift you can give to someone — because it can change people’s mindset and modify their behavior in the most positive, valuable way. We’re creating an environment where people say, ‘You know what? It’s okay to make a mistake, because that’s how I’m going to grow the most.’ That’s a big part of our culture change.” (Donna Morris) — culture of humility

Track for Accountability: “To build a culture of accountability, install continuous reassessment and honest and objective grading — and start at the top. When leaders openly admit their missteps, contributors feel freer to take healthy risks.”

Track for Accountability: “To sustain high performance, encourage weekly one-on-one OKR meetings between contributors and managers, plus monthly departmental meetings.”

There is a whole discipline around OKRs, but what struck me the most is the difference it can make to either have a system for observing desires, activities, and results, or to largely fly by the seat of your pants.

Some Highlighted Quotes From The Book

“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.”

“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”

“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 is a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. Now, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They cannot substitute for sound judgement, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop.”

“High-performance organizations home in on work that’s important and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter.”

“There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.” (Andy Grove)

“A few unvarnished excerpts, straight from the father of OKRs:

“Now, the two key phrases…are objectives and the key result. And they match the two purposes. The objective is the direction: ‘We want to dominate the mid-range microcomputer component business.’ That’s an objective. That’s where we’re going to go. Key results for this quarter: ‘Win ten new designs for the 8085’ is one key result. It’s a milestone. The two are not the same…”

“The key result has to be measurable. But at the end you can look, and without any arguments: Did I do that or did I not do it? Yes? No? Simple. No judgments in it.

“Now, did we dominate the mid-range microcomputer business? That’s for us to argue in the years to come, but over the next quarter we’ll know whether we’ve won ten new designs or not.”

“Andy Grove’s quantum leap was to apply manufacturing production principles to the “soft professions,” the administrative, professional, and managerial ranks. He sought to ‘create an environment that values and emphasizes output’ and to avoid what Drucker termed the ‘activity trap’: ‘Stressing output is the key to increasing productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.’ On an assembly line, it’s easy enough to distinguish output from activity: It gets trickier when employees are paid to think. Grove wrestled with two riddles: How can we define and measure output by knowledge workers? And what can be done to increase it?”

“Bill [Davidow] grafted the critical connective tissue — the phrase ‘as measured by,’ or a.m.b. — into Intel’s company OKRs. For example, ‘We will achieve a certain OBJECTIVE as measured by the following KEY RESULT….’ Bill’s a.m.b. made the implicit explicit to all.”

“When you’re really high up in management, you’re teaching. We were all taught that if you measured it, things got better.”

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people walk out of meetings saying, ‘I’m going to conquer the world’…and three months later, nothing has happened. You get people whipped up with enthusiasm, but they don’t know what to do with it. In a crisis, you need a system that can drive transformation — quickly. That’s what the key result system did for Intel. It gave management a tool for rapid implementation. And when people reported on what they’d gotten done, we had black-and-white criteria for assessment.”

“Bad companies,’ Andy wrote, ‘are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

“It is our choices…that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” (J.K. Rowling)

“When you’re the CEO or the founder of a company…you’ve got to say ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ and then you have to model it. Because if you don’t model it, no one’s going to do it.” (Bill Campbell)

“To paraphrase Voltaire: Don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of good. Or as Sheryl Sandberg says: ‘Done is better than perfect.’”

“Innovation means saying no to a thousand things.” (Steve Jobs)

“We must realized — and act on the realization — that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.” (Andy Grove)

“The system held my personal focus, too. I tried to limit myself to three to four individual objectives, tops. I printed them out and kept them close on my notepad and next to my computer, everywhere I went. Each morning, I’d say to myself, ‘These are my three buckets, and what am I going to do today to move the company forward?’ That’s a great question for any leader, with or without a learning issue.” (Brett Kopf)

“Today, with the invaluable support of our CMS partners, Nuna has built a secure, flexible data platform to store private health information for more than 74 million Americans. But we aspire to do so much more. We want our platform to inform policy makers as they grapple with governing a costly and complex health care system. We want it to drive analytics, to help predict and prevent future ailments. Most of all, we want it to play a big role in improving the nation’s health care. It’s a daunting commitment. But as I learned at Google: The hairier the mission, the more important your OKRs.” (Jini Kim)

“In a recent survey of one thousand working U.S. adults, 92 percent said they’d be more motivated to reach their goals if colleagues could see their progress.”

“In larger organizations, it’s common to find several people unwittingly working on the same thing. By clearing a line of sight to everyone’s objectives, OKRs expose redundant efforts and save time and money.”

“The answer lies in focused, transparent OKRs. They knit each individual’s work to team efforts, departmental projects, and the overall mission. As a species, we crave connection. In the workplace, we’re naturally curious about what our leaders are doing and how our work weaves into theirs. OKRs are the vehicle of choice for vertical alignment.”

“Having goals improves performance. Spending hours cascading goals up and down the company, however, does not… We have a market-based approach, where over time our goals all converge because the top OKRs are known and everyone else’s OKRs are visible. Teams that are grossly out of alignment stand out, and the few major initiatives that touch everyone are easy enough to manage directly.” (Laszlo Bock)

“The ‘professional employee,’ Peter Drucker wrote, ‘needs rigorous performance standards and high goals… But how he does his work should always be his responsibility and his decision.”

“When goals are public and visible to all, a ‘team of teams’ can attack trouble spots wherever they surface. Adds Bock: ‘You can see immediately if somebody’s hitting the ball out of the park — you investigate. If somebody’s mission all the time, you investigate. Transparency creates very clear signals for everyone. You kick off virtuous cycles that reinforce your ability to actually get your work done. And the management tax is zero — it’s amazing.”

“When people understand your priorities and constraints, they’re more apt to trust you when something goes sideways.” (Atticus Tysen)

“In God we trust; all others must bring data.” (W. Edwards Deming)

“The single greatest motivator is ‘making progress in one’s work.’ The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged.” (Daniel Pink)

“Unlike steps on Fitbit, OKRs don’t require daily tracking. But regular check-ins — preferably weekly — are essential to prevent slippage. As Peter Drucker observed, ‘Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events. And without check-ins to reexamine the plan as events unfold, the executive has no way of knowing which events really matter and which are only noise.”

“Learning ‘from direct experience,’ a Harvard Business School study found, ‘can be more effective if coupled with reflection — that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.’ The philosopher and educator John Dewey went a step further: ‘We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”

“If companies don’t continue to innovate, they’re going to die — and I didn’t say iterate, I said innovate.” (Bill Campbell)

“The harder the goal the higher the level of performance… Although subjects with very hard goals reached their goals far less often than subjects with very easy goals, the former consistently performed at a higher level than the latter.” (Edwin Locke)

“The definition of entrepreneurs: Those who do more than anyone thinks possible…with less than anyone thinks possible. By contrast with bureaucrats, who do less than anyone thinks possible with more than anyone thinks possible.”

“If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.” (Larry Page)

“In a way, I think I dreamt even more fervently because so little technology was available to us. I was driven by the power of imagining.” (Sundar Pichai)

“Larry [Page] was always good about upping the goals for the company OKRs. He used certain phrases that stuck with me. He wanted people at Google to be ‘uncomfortably excited.’ He wanted us to have ‘a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ (Sundar Pichai)

“Engineers struggle with goal setting in two big ways. They hate crossing off anything they think is a good idea, and they habitually underestimate how long it takes to get things done.” (Cristos Goodrow)

“In a world where computing power is nearly limitless, the true scare commodity is increasingly human attention.” (Satya Nadella)

“Talking can transform minds, which can transform behaviors, which can transform institutions.” (Sheryl Sandberg)

“Conversations, Feedback, Recognition (CFR)

Conversations: an authentic, richly textured exchange between manager and contributor, aimed at driving performance

Feedback: bidirectional or networked communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide future improvement

Recognition: expressions of appreciation to deserving individuals for contributions of all sizes

“When companies replace — or at least augment — the annual review with ongoing conversations and real-time feedback, they’re better able to make improvements throughout the year. Alignment and transparency become everyday imperatives. When employees are struggling, their managers don’t sit and wait for some scheduled day of reckoning. They jump into tough discussions like firefighters, without hesitation.”

“Peter Drucker was one of the first to stress the value of regular one-on-one meetings between managers and their direct reports. Andy Grove estimated that ninety minutes of a manger’s time ‘can enhance the quality of your subordinate’s work for two weeks.”

“Andy believed the ‘subordinate’ should do 90 percent of the talking. When I met with my boss at Intel, he focused on how he could help me achieve my key result.”

“As [Donna Morris] wrote on Adobe’s intranet, the challenge at hand was to ‘review contributions, reward accomplishments, and give and receive feedback. Do they need to be conflated into a cumbersome process? I don’t think so. It’s time to think radically differently. If we did away with our ‘annual review,’ what would you like to see in its place? What would it look like to inspire, motivate, and value contributions more effectively?’”

“Corrective feedback is naturally difficult for people. But when done well, it’s also the greatest gift you can give to someone — because it can change people’s mindset and modify their behavior in the most positive, valuable way. We’re creating an environment where people say, ‘You know what? It’s okay to make a mistake, because that’s how I’m going to grow the most.’ That’s a big part of our culture change.” (Donna Morris)

“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.” (Donna Morris)

“On the long and demanding road to operating excellence, [OKRs and CFRs] help organizations improve each and every day. Leaders become better communicators and motivators. Contributors grow into more disciplined, rigorous thinkers. When imbued with meaningful conversations and feedback, structured goal setting teaches people how to work within constraints even as they push against them — an especially critical lesson for smaller, scaling operations.”

“When you hit a wall, you think, I’ll just work harder — that’s what got me here. What you should do is more counter intuitive: 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.” (Alex Garden)

“Every two weeks, each person at Zume has a one-hour one-on-one conversation with whomever they report to. It’s a sacred time. You cannot be late; you cannot cancel. There’s only one other rule: You don’t talk about work. The agenda is you, the individual, and what you are trying to accomplish personally over the next two to three years, and how you’re breaking that into a two-week plan. I like to start with three questions: What makes you happy? What saps your energy? How would you describe your dream job?” (Alex Garden)

“And so the question becomes: How do companies define and build a positive culture? While I have no simple answer, OKRs and CFRs provide a blueprint. By aligning teams to work toward a handful of common objectives, then uniting them through lightweight, goal-oriented communications, OKRs and CFRs create transparency and accountability, the tent poles for sustained high performance. Healthy culture and structured goal setting are interdependent. They’re natural partners in the quest for operating excellence.”

“In Project Aristotle, an internal Google study of 180 teams, standout performance correlated to affirmative responses to these five questions:

Structure and clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?

Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?

Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?

Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?

Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?”

“Feedback is a listening system. In the new world of work, leaders cannot wait for negative critiques on Glassdoor, or for valued contributors to exit for another job. They need to listen and capture signals as they are emitted.”

“A rule book can tell me what I can or can’t do. I need culture to tell me what I should do.” (Dov Seidman)

“I’m convinced that if structured goal setting and continuous communication were to be widely deployed, with rigor and imagination, we could see exponentially greater productivity and innovation throughout society.”

“People are the most important thing that we do. We have to try and make them better.” (Bill Campbell)

Writing Effective OKRs

Objectives are the ‘Whats.’ They:

• express goals and intents
• are aggressive yet realistic
• must be tangible, objective, and unambiguous; should be obvious to a rational observer whether an objective has been achieved
• The successful achievement of an objective must provide clear value for [the company]

Key Results are the ‘Hows.’ They:

• express measurable milestones which, if achieved, will advance objectives in a useful manner to their constituents
• must describe outcomes, not activities. If your KRs include words like ‘consult, help, analyze, or participate’ they describe activities. Instead, describe the end-user impact of these activities: ‘publish average and tail latency measurements from six Colossus cells by March 7,’ rather than ‘assess Colossus latency.’
• must include evidence of completion. This evidence must be available, credible, and easily discoverable. Examples of evidence include change lists, links to docs, notes, and published metrics reports

“A common error is writing key results that are necessary but not sufficient to collectively complete the objective. The error is tempting because it allows a team to avoid the difficult (resource/priority/risk) commitments needed to deliver ‘hard’ key results.”

Track for Accountability: “To build a culture of accountability, install continuous reassessment and honest and objective grading — and start at the top. When leaders openly admit their missteps, contributors feel freer to take healthy risks.”

Track for Accountability: “To sustain high performance, encourage weekly one-on-one OKR meetings between contributors and managers, plus monthly departmental meetings.”

Stretch for Amazing: “Establish an environment where individuals are free to fail without judgment.”