Focusing on What Is Most Important — Review of Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

Book Author: Christina Wodtke

Dustin Flanary

6 min readJul 4, 2017

“OKRs are the thing you want to push, the one thing you want to focus on making better”.

Intro

Radical Focus is part business fable, part follow-up suggestions and advice on the value of implementing OKRs in your business. OKR stands for Objective, Key Results. It’s a method that Wodtke says Google, Zynga, LinkedIn and other startups use to help the company align its goals and be more effective in achieving them, or at least make significant progress in doing so.

I read this book because my current company just started implementing them and I wanted to get an idea of how they should be implemented and what makes them most effective. It’s also a very short read, just 156 pages, and the pages themselves don’t have too many words on them.

Ratings

Likelihood of recommending a friend to read? 📚📚📚
Likelihood of recommending a friend to purchase? 💰💰
Positive Influence: ⭐⭐⭐
Time to read (more stars is more time): 🗿
How related to business? 🕴️🕴️🕴️🕴️🕴

“The first time you try OKRs, you are likely to fail. This is a dangerous situation, as your team may become disillusioned with the approach, and be unwilling to try them again…There are three approaches you can use to reduce this risk.
1. Start with only one OKR for the company. By setting a simple goal for the company, your team sees the executive team holding themselves to a high standard. It won’t be surprising when next quarter they are asked to do the same. And by not cascading it, you both simplify implementation and see who chooses to adopt OKRs and who will need coaching.
2. Have one team adopt OKRs before the entire company does. Choose an independent team that has all the skills to achieve their goals. You can then trumpet their success if it happens, or wait a cycle or two until they perfect their approach and then roll out OKRs across the company.
3. Start out by applying OKRs to projects, in order to train people on the Objective-Result approach. GatherContent is a great example. Every time they have a major project, they first ask what is the Objective for this project, and how will we know if we’ve succeeded.”

Two or Three Favorite Things

One of the things I really liked about this book was the internal struggle that the main characters (2 very different founders of a coffee-connecting startup) went through. One was pragmatic and sales-oriented, the other was was a designer who struggled as a manager.

They had a disgruntled employee they had to deal with and had to make a target-market shift once they realized what had to happen to make money. The internal politicking and the difficulty of choosing where to focus when there are so many things to do seemed super applicable to what happens in business, especially small businesses.

‘Okay, so you got that the Objective is the inspiration for the quarter, yeah? And the Results are what happens if you do the right things. It’s easy to forget them, though, because every day something cool shows up. So every Monday you look at them. And you ask, are we closer or farther from making these Results? We used a confidence rating…We’d start the quarter with each Key Result at five out of ten.’
‘Fifty percent confidence? A 50/50 shot at making it?’ asked Hanna.
‘Exactly. Goals aren’t divided into regular and stretch goals. They’re all stretch goals. And they need to be hard. Not impossible, just hard. Impossible goals are depressing. Hard goals are inspiring…So each week, you have a conversation. You say, have we gone up or down? If you are dropping to 2/10 from 8/10, you want to know why. What changed? Helps you learn as well as track’

The goal is to set the right kind of goals.

Get Dustin Flanary’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

If goals are too easy, they don’t require enough effort. If they are too hard, the same thing happens because we don’t believe they are achievable and may thus avoid any effort at all.

To start out with a goal with only a 50/50 chance of achieving means that not reaching some goals is expected.

Nonetheless, the Objective does move us in the direction we want to go.

Personal Impact

I don’t think I felt a ton of personal impact from the book, but enough to make me want to implement OKRs on my personal goals so that I can make sure I am focusing on my most important objectives. It’s definitely easy to apply in one’s own goal-making. When I was a missionary, I struggled with the goals we were supposed to set. We had metrics set that we were expected to get and other ones that were excellent. We definitely had Key Results though (they were called Key Indicators) so it was a similar idea now that I think about it.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this was a decent book. The fable was short and effective, and I like the simplicity of OKRs in goal-setting. What remains confusing is the 4-metric square the author suggests for tracking health metrics & upcoming priorities. I wish that had been fleshed out a little bit more.

I liked the book though and I think it’s a recommended read for small and medium-sized business, and even large ones. It’s hard to align everyone to work towards common goals. Applying OKRs as presented by Christina Wodtke provides a pretty effective way of helping people to focus the most important goals and having a way to measure progress towards those goals.

AUTHOR’S QUICK TIPS ON OKRS USE

Set only one OKR for the company, unless you have multiple business lines. It’s about focus.
Give yourself three months for an OKR. How bold is it if you can do it in a week?
Keep the metrics out of the Objective. The Objective is inspirational.
In the weekly check in, open with company OKR, then do groups. Don’t do every individual; that’s better in private 1:1s. Which you do have every week, right?
OKRs cascade; set company OKRs, then group’s/role’s, and then individual’s.
OKRs are not the only thing you do; they are the one thing you must do. Trust people to keep the ship running, and don’t jam every task into your OKRs.
The Monday OKR check in is a conversation. Be sure to discuss change in confidence, health, metrics and priorities.
Encourage employees to suggest company OKRs. OKRs are great bottom up, not just top down.
Make OKRs available publicly. Google has them on their intranet.
Friday celebrations is an antidote to Monday’s grim business. Keep it upbeat!

“OKRs aren’t about hitting targets, but about learning what you are really capable of.”

Additional Notes

BetterWorks is a company that makes it easy to implement OKRs across your company. My former employer Jane.com utilized it, which is helpful when there are many employees.