Measure What Matters Book Summary

Book Summary

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Brief Summary

Objectives and key results (OKRs) revolutionize performance management for organizations and teams. By focusing on a smaller set of meaningful goals, businesses can thrive. The superpowers of focus, alignment, accountability, and ambition maximize success. Replace the traditional performance relics with continuous performance management. You need to fully embrace OKRs to succeed.

About the Author

John Doerr is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. As a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, he was an economic advisor to Obama. As of 2017, Forbes ranked him 303rd richest person in the world with a net worth of 7.5 billion dollars as of February 16, 2018.

He wrote the book, Measure What Matters.

He was born in St Louis, Missouri. He graduated with a B.S and M.E.E in electrical engineering from Rice University. He later obtained his M.B.A from Harvard Business School in 1976. He started working for Intel in 1975 as a successful salesperson.

He holds several patents for memory devices.

In 1980, he started working for Kleiner Perkins. At Kleiner, he has overseen the funding of several successful technology companies such as Amazon.com, Intuit, and Google. He serves on the boards of Google and Zynga. He led Kleiner’s $150 million investment in Twitter in 2012. He serves on the board of the Obama Foundation and ONE.org.

He founded and serves on the board of the New Schools Venture Fund, which has the goal of reforming education. He also founded Technet, a policy network of high tech CEOs that seek education and litigation reforms. He co-chaired California’s Proposition 39, which decreased the threshold to approved school bonds, and Proposition 71, which facilitated $3 billion in funding for research into stem cell therapies.

He supports climate change and clean energy. In 2007, he held a TED talk about fighting global warming.

Doerr married Ann Doerr. They have two children. He pledges to give back his fortunes to charity over his lifetime.

Topics

Entrepreneurship Management & Leadership

Measure What Matters Book Summary Preview

Before John Doerr was a venture capitalist and the author of Measure What Matters, he was just a guy looking for a girl. In the summer of 1975, Doerr went to Silicon Valley to try to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend without knowing where she worked. But luck was on his side. He landed an internship at Intel, which turned out to be where she worked. Doerr got the girl.

It also turned out to be a gamechanger for his career. At Intel, Doerr learned about objectives and key results (OKRs). Championed by Intel co-founder Andy Grove, Doerr saw their impact firsthand. Using a few objectives that were measured against key results, Intel saw consistent growth with Grove at the helm. Grove was CEO of Intel for 11 years and the company grew by 40% each year.

After seeing the proof at Intel, Doerr wanted to spread the gospel of OKRs. Measure What Matters are about achieving success by focusing on what’s important.

The main points of the book are:

An idea means nothing without a plan.

Have you ever had an idea that went nowhere? Ideas are common. Without following through, the idea is meaningless.

To turn an idea into a success, you need a structured approach. You have to know what steps to take to get from theory to reality. Designing the right plan for the right idea is the real challenge.

Doerr’s OKR management framework has a solution to this challenge. You have to break everything down into measurable accomplishments with two steps. First, you define what success looks like. This is the objective component of the OKR framework. Second, you map out how to get there. This is the key results component of the OKR framework described below.

Think of the idea as a resource that you start with. It is important and necessary, but success depends on what you do with that resource.

For the road to success, you need to know the destination and how to make sure you’re on the right path.

Doerr’s OKR system has two main parts: the objectives (O) and the key results (KR).

The objectives are the destination. This is what success looks like to you in terms of a few goals. Objectives are usually long-term and think about the big picture or the overall vision. The objectives should be inspirational, aspirational, and significant.

The key results are the landmarks on the way to the destination. You are not only measuring whether or not you get to the objective. You need targets along the way that are specific, measurable, and verifiable. You want to make sure you’re going the right way before you get too far away from the goal. Breaking down the overall goal into pieces helps keep you on track towards each objective.