It was in 1999 when the author made the biggest bet in his 19-year long career as a venture capitalist: $11.8 million for 12% of a startup founded by a couple of young Stanford graduates. Their motto —"Organize the world of information and make it functional and universally accessible"— could still be ambitious, but Doerr trusted Larry Page and Sergey Brin: they were determined to change the world and Doerr thought they might have a chance.
The two founders of Google were visionaries with enormous entrepreneurial energy, the only thing they lacked was management experience. They needed to learn to make tough decisions, to keep their team on track, they needed to collect the relevant data to chart progress and be able to measure the most important things. Doerr’s gift to Google was a sharp tool for achieving world-class performance, a model he learned from the best manager of all time, Andy Grove, during his years at Intel.
This model, called OKR (Objectives and Key Results), is a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. It's a management methodology that helps ensure that efforts are focused on the same important issues throughout the organization's chain, from the bottom up.
An objective is simply what we have to achieve, nothing more and nothing less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action-oriented and inspirational. If properly designed and deployed, they are a vaccine against confused thinking and uncertain execution.
Key results are benchmarks and monitor how the objective is achieved. To be effective, they must be specific, time-bound, aggressive but realistic and, above all, measurable and verifiable. Either you meet the requirements of a key result, or you don't: there is no gray area, no room for doubt. At the end of the designated period, usually three months, they will indicate whether the key result has been achieved or not.
