What You Must Know About Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)To Be Successful At All Levels? Wisdom From Great Leaders. Part 3.

 

OKR As A Tool To Set Priorities — Align Work

Recently, John Doerr published a new book called “Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs.” And it has rekindled interest in Objectives and Key Results (OKR). John was first exposed to OKRs at Intel in the 1970s. At the time, it was called “Management By Objectives (MBO)” by Andy Grove (former Chairman and CEO of Intel.)

John called Andy the “Father of OKRs” and credited Andy for creating and inculcating a new way of structured goal setting. What can be a better way to learn how to be successful with OKRs than learning from Andy?

In Chapter 6 of his book “High Output Management”, Andy described Management by Objectives as part of the planning process. According to Andy, the idea behind MBO is extremely simple: If you don’t know where you’re going, you will not get there. A successful MBO system needs only to answer two questions:

• Where do I want to go? (The answer provides the objective.)
• How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (The answer gives us milestones or key results.) Read More...