Don Dodge is an evangelist at Google (his official title is Developer Advocate) and he writes a blog called Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing. In his January 28 post "How Google sets goals and measures success" he outlines a nifty approach called setting OKRs. Interestingly, Mark Pincus, the founder and CEO of Zynga, commented in a profile of him in the New York Times on January 30, 2010 (see Corner Office) that he uses the OKR process, something he learned from John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins fame), who, in turn, learned it from Intel. My "pay attention" alert is deafening given these smart people taking about OKRs.
What is an OKR? It is an acronym for Objective - Key Result. According to Pincus:
"...the idea is that the whole company and every group has one objective and three measurable key results, and if you achieve two of the three, you achieve your overall objective, and if you achieve all three, you've really killed it...we put the whole company on that, so everyone knows their OKR's. And that is a good, simple organizing principle that keeps people focused on the three things that matter -- not the 10."
Dodge writes:
"Every quarter every group at Google sets goals, called OKRs, for the next 90 days. Most big companies set annual goals like improving or growing something by x%, and then measure performance once a year. At Google a year is like a decade. Annual goals aren’t good enough. Set quarterly goals, set them at impossible levels, and then figure out how to achieve them. Measure progress every quarter and reward outstanding achievement."
Sounds pretty simple and powerful. One can always learn something new from smart people.
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