Notes on Why The Secret to Success is Setting the Right Goals
When I listened to it: March 2022
Why I listened to it: While researching the differences between good and bad goals, I stumbled across this TED talk. The speaker, John Doerr, is a champion of Andy Grove’s Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) system.
Go here for the talk or scroll down for my notes.
Want to get my future notes when I publish them? Subscribe to my weekly newsletter below.
My notes
About John Doerr
John Doerr is the chairman of Kleiner Perkins and the author of Speed and Scale and Measure What Matters. Doerr was an original investor and board member at Amazon and Google.
About Andy Grove
Andy Grove was a Hungarian-American businessman, engineer, and CEO of Intel Corporation. He’s been called the greatest manager of his or any other era. John Doerr worked under Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s.
Goals are important.
Setting the right goals can mean the difference between success and failure. Some leaders fail because they lead people towards the wrong objective.
Great leaders set clear, meaningful, and audacious goals. We need the right goals for the right reasons. And those goals should be clear and compelling.
Execution matters more than what you know.
Andy Grove shared the single most important lesson of John Doerr's career when he said, “John, it almost doesn’t matter what you know. Execution is what matters most.”
The Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) system
At Intel, Andy Grove invented a powerful system to drive execution called Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs. Companies like Google and Intel have used OKRs to get collective commitment to stretch goals and foster an environment of safe experimentation and risk-taking.
The objective is the direction. Objectives are where you want to go. They represent what you want to accomplish. When setting an objective, be sure to make it clear why it matters. The best objectives are action-oriented and inspiring.
The key results are the milestones. Key results are measurable and should tell you whether you did or did not complete them. They are how you plan to accomplish the objective. Good key results are specific and time-bound, aggressive but realistic, measurable, and verifiable.
OKRs are not a substitute for strong leadership, but once the fundamentals are in place, they can accelerate progress.
Additional resources on OKRs: