Kleiner Perkins.

Now, saying John is a successful venture capitalist is a bit like saying Steph Curry is a successful

basketball player.

It's an accurate statement, but seriously understates things.

John has backed some the most successful technology firms ever, including Google, Amazon, Slack,

Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Intuit, and the list goes on and on.

John has also in his spare time just published a new book called Measure What Matters, in

which he discusses the power of objectives and key results, also known as OKRs,

a tool that he's introduced to a dozens of startups, many of which are now household

names.

So, John, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today.

Don, I'm thrilled to talk with you, right?

I daresay, you're quite an expert in this field.

I've been taken by the papers you've written and look forward to our conversation.

Oh, great.

Thank you.

According to a recent survey, more than % of organizations use goals in one form or another.

So many folks watching these videos will be familiar with goals, but not necessarily with

OKRs.

In a nutshell, what are OKRs, and how in your assessment do they differ from more traditional,

more common approaches to goals?

OKRs stand for objectives and key results, and it's a deceptively simple goal-setting

system that was invented in the s by one of the greatest managers of his or any other

era, Dr. Andy Grove.

Grove loved teaching, by the way.

He felt that the role of a leader and a chief executive is to be a teacher.

Andy was building the preeminent microchip company.

You know, in the semiconductor industry thousands of people have to get lines that are a millionth

of a meter wide exactly right, or nothing works and so—

He was kind of mentor of mine, and he grabbed me one day and said, you know, John it almost

doesn't matter what you know.

It's execution that's everything.

And let me bring this back to OKRs.

Andy Grove invented a system, a scalable system for execution, where you write down what it

is that you want to have accomplished.

That's the objective.

And then the key results, which are how you're going to get it done.

What and how.

Objectives and key results.

And this system that he invented differed dramatically from the conventional goal-setting

systems of the days, which were management by objectives.

Those systems tended to be annual, Retrospective, backward-looking,

tied to goals, top down, hierarchical, and honestly not very effective.

Even Peter Drucker, one of the original proponents of those managements by objective systems

eventually soured on them.

So Andy turned that system upside down in inventing these objectives and key results.

And to this day, Intel uses them to great advantage.

I worked with him, for Andy, early on in my career.

And when I left Intel I took literally his slide set, that way of setting goals, to every

organization that I worked with.

Most of them adopted them.

Not all of them.

Everyone adapted them; that is, they tailored them for their own culture and their own particular

business needs.

But no organization has embraced them more fully

than Google has, and it's affected more than what they do.

It affects their culture, their language, their aggressiveness, their willingness to

stretch.

I'll sum this up by saying that there are five real key advantages that accrue

to a user of OKRs.

These are the payoffs.

The first is, you get exceptional focus.

The second is, because these are transparent, you get a high degree of alignment,

focus, alignment.

The third thing you get is an uncommon degree of commitment.

These goals end up being your kind of social contract between everyone in the organization

as they declare, I'm going to go for this key result that relates to these objectives,

and then you can track the progress through the course of days

and weeks and months in the life of an organization.

Finally, at Intel, at Google, this kind of a transparent goal system, which

importantly is not tied to compensation, it—you don't pay bonuses, people aren't promoted

based on them.

That allows you to really build a risk-taking culture, where it's okay

to stretch for something almost impossible to do and not quite make it, but still have

a considerable accomplishment.

Indeed, at Google, if you're achieving all of your goals, you're getting all greens as

grades, you probably weren't stretching far enough

or hard enough.

Now, that's all a matter of management judgment.

But those five payoffs—the focus, the alignment, the commitment, the tracking and the stretching,

are powerful.

They don't come with most other goal systems, and I like to remember them because they're

just the facts, f-a-c-t-s.

Terrific.

But let me if I could dig into a couple of elements that you mentioned there, John, around

how OKRs vary from the more traditional goal-setting approaches.

And one of them is this element of ambition.

The kind of conventional wisdom and goals, particularly as it's embodied in

the so-called smart goal-setting, really focuses on having goals that are achievable and realistic.

In your book you talk a lot about the importance of ambition.

How do you see the relationship between ambitions and goals?

So, Larry Page put it best.

And he's probably the high priest of X goals.

Larry said, I would much prefer that a team set a goal to go to Mars and know that if

they fall short, they're still likely to achieve something extraordinary, like get to the moon.

So, the natural tendency, particularly when goals are the basis of promotions or bonuses,

is to be conservative.

And Jeff Bezos deeply, deeply believed that the natural tendency

as organizations grow is to grow more conservative, to grow more analytic.

He called this the “institutional no.”

And it was very important to Jeff that as Amazon grows, that they still be willing to

do bold, nearly unbelievable campaigns, initiatives.

And a lot of those will fail.

The fundamental question is, is it okay to fail?

Do you have a risk-taking, culture?

And that answer will vary by industry, by structure

of the market and the competition.

I for one have wondered a lot about this as it relates to health care

and hospital systems.

I think running a hospital is one of the most difficult jobs in the world, with enormous

pressures.

Lives are on the line and thousands of people are making tens of thousands of decisions.

Do we really want risk-taking in those institutions?

I recently talked about this work with the CEO of one of the nation's absolutely most

admired health care systems, and he said his number

one goal as the new CEO of this system is to get them to embrace and adopt objectives

and key results; that there are a whole host of dimensions in which he wants risk-taking

and stretching.

And then there's others in the parlance of Google where you must achieve % of the goals.

% will not be good enough and the wonderful engineers

at Google decided not only to measure accomplishments down to a tenth of a decimal point, but to

distinguish between aspirational goals, which would be stretched, and committed goals, where

the expectation is, % is what should be achieved.

And John, in your experience with the companies you've worked with, the executives, you've

talked to, how should companies think about that mix,

right?

Because the challenges—the hospital example gives a terrific one, where there's some activities

you really don't want doctors necessarily experimenting with; does it work to wash my

hands or not?

That's really more of an Atul Gawande checklist kind of

thing.

But in other cases, as the CEO you mentioned talks about, there's a need for stretch, a

need for innovation.

How have you seen companies strike that balance well?

How do you think about how executives and leaders to strike that balance?

I have a couple thoughts.

The first is that companies are in different phases at different times,

not just as they grow, but as their market conditions change.

So the book says there's times when you need to really batten down the hatches and execute.

Perhaps you have some really critical milestones to achieve before a financing of some sort.

And then the goals are going to tend to be less aspirational and more focused on

how we must execute in the here and now.

That's one thought.

But the other larger view is, OKRs are not a silver bullet.

They don't substitute at any point in time for

a strong culture or stronger management.

I like to say that good business judgment trumps this system, but when those fundamentals

are in place when you have a strong culture and stronger management,

this kind of goal system can take a team to the mountaintop.

I've seen it time and time again.

Yeah, I'd like to stick on that point about not being a silver bullet.

Every time I've heard you talk about OKRs you've been super explicit about that point,

that they're a power tool, but not a silver bullet.

And their success depends on things like leadership and the culture.

As you think back about companies that have embraced OKRs and really harnessed their full

potential, what are the other complementary attributes or traits that allowed them to

make the most of the tool?

And/or on the other side, organizations that haven't kind of leveraged it to its full potential?

What maybe have they been lacking?

So here's why they most often fail.

And it's because the CEO or the leader of the function is not personally committed.

How do we measure that commitment?

Does the CEO write down her objectives and key results every quarter, the personal ones?

And are those different than the ones for the company overall?

And will she stand up in front of the entire organization—now, every quarter in an All

Hands meeting, and review their personal successes and failures?

Do they become part of the language, the rhythm of the operation?

Not just checked quarterly, but used in staff meetings, in one on one meetings.

Are they the basis on which the company communicates to the board?

Not just financial statements, but these all-important priorities.

Remember, OKRs are not the sum of all tasks.

They are the few things that we're trying to highlight and isolate because they deserve

special attention.

Does the leader of the organization, and for that matter, the organization itself, have

a system whereby they can cheer on the successes of colleagues and

nudge others forward, who are falling short?

These kinds of social signals you can find in modern scalable structured goal-setting

systems.

And they're super important.

When you really get the organization living and breathing it,

this doesn't become the soul of the team, but it's

the goalpost, it's the milestones.

It can be the game plan.

There's a twin sister, if you will, for OKRs that I described in the book called CFRs,

which stands for conversations, feedback, and recognition.

And so the goals clearly lay out what it is we want to have accomplished.

I think of those in the football analogy as the objective is the goalposts and the key

results are the -yard markers as we march our way down the field.

But equally important are the huddles and the plays that we're calling, and

feedback and course corrections along the way.

Those are what CFRs are.

Or in HR-speak, I think this is being referred to as “continuous performance management,”

as compared to doing annual performance reviews.

We're seeing more and more organizations, I think now something like % for the Fortune

, are just ditching the annual performance review altogether

in favor of more frequent feedback.

And this is especially important with millennial workers who want constant feedback.

They want to know how they fit in the big picture.

But they don't want to be micromanaged and so

CFRs, OKRs are powerful tools to both engage and make the most of their ambition.

These are terrific points, especially this notion of embedding the OKRs in ongoing conversations

around feedback, around review, and the importance of the transparency so

that they're not, as you rightly know, framed as kind of individual performance management,

an individual sport.

They're viewed as a team sport, that collectively we're going to execute and move down the hashtags

to the goalpost.

I wonder, another element that you mentioned, and I think it's just going to be so surprising

to folks, it would be terrific if you could dig in a bit more.

A lot of companies, a lot of leaders pride themselves on pay for performance.