Measure What Matters

How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

By: John Doerr, Larry Page - foreword

Narrated by: John Doerr, full cast

Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's Summary

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 50 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.

Read by John Doerr, William Davidow, Brett Kopf, Jini Kim, Mike Lee, Atticus Tysen, Patti Stonesifer, Susan Wojcicki, Cristos Goodrow, Julia Collins, Alex Garden, Joseph Suzuki, Andrew Cole, Bono, and others 

©2018 John Doerr (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic Reviews

“I’d recommend John’s book for anyone interested in becoming a better manager.” (Bill Gates)

“Whether you're a seasoned CEO or a first-time entrepreneur, you'll find valuable lessons, tools, and inspiration in the pages of Measure What Matters. I'm glad John invested the time to share these ideas with the world.” (Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and author of The Start-Up of You)

“Measure What Matters deserves to be fully embraced by every person responsible for performance, in any walk of life. John Doerr makes Andy Grove a mentor to us all. If every team, leader, and individual applied OKRs with rigor and imagination, all sectors of society could see an exponential increase in productivity and innovation.” (Jim Collins, author of Good to Great)

Valuable content. Tough listen.

Too long, somewhat repetitive, terrible audio editing. But, the core content is worthy. Buy this one in print...skip the audio.

Educational, inspirational, entertaining, ~dry..

As one of the preeminent Oracles on turning nothing into something, when John Doerr speaks, it's "probably" best that we pay attention. And in this audible, John has help from many high-producing people who tell their own stories.

Following the "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything" ideal, this book is somewhere between an exhibitionary, to an in-depth guide, on how to produce lasting results in any area of your life. Here is what I got out of it:

Educational- How and why to implement OKR's (Objectives and Key Results) and CFR's (Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition), ideas originated at Intel by Andy Grove.

Inspirational- Hearing the pragmatic parts of real success stories is always inspirational.

Entertaining- This audible includes a full cast of characters; some as necessary imitations, but mostly the originals.

Dry- For me it was a bit dry at times, as "educational" topics sometimes are; so depending on your taste, you might want to prepare to rewind many times so you don't miss out something important. Worth the rewinds, though.

In all, we are very lucky to have access to such invaluable experiences as exhibited in this book.

Inspiration and knowledge on OKRs

This is a great resource on extensive OKR knowledge. From historical explanation on the subject, to hands on explanation on how to use and apply OKR now within any organisation - small or large. The book is full of examples from players like Google and Intel to mention few. As an extra spice it is in part read by Bill Gates, Bono and many others who use the OKRs within their organization. An amazing book!

Blueprint for working smarter

ideas vs execution. Andy Grove's statement about all the hard work that's done by so many but not effective execution hit home

Last chapter covers what matters most

Last chapter covers what matters most and with more detail; the rest of the book is anecdotes.

Unstructured

Teaching by examples is nice and the summary at the end somewhat makes up for it, but this is mostly a collection of stories. The approach to OKR is experimental rather than systemic and it would be so much more useful if the book went into much more detailed examples of OKRs, followed a team over time as their OKRs are developing and changing as a result of internal interactions. Even if this information was 10 years old, it would be much more useful as connected block than the sampling and wild jumping around in this book.

OK

Glad I read, but OKRs are concepts that could be grasped in a paragraph. Thoroughly explained in a few pages. Felt unnecessarily long.

Thank you! Great job!

Perfect audio, nice to hear speakers with their stories and the author's voice. Interesting, well paced, super mix of theory and examples. Excellent!

Well done!!

Great book!! Loved the variety of narration by story owners (was a nice touch). John truly has a passion for the subject and a keen insight as well. Glad to have read this book and will likely read again.

Impact > Activity

This book is a great reminder that activity != impact. It gets the reader thinking about why they are doing something, not just what they are doing.