Measure What Matters
How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
Book Edition Details
Summary
"Measure What Matters (2018) chronicles John Doerr’s lifelong journey of helping organizations implement objectives and key results – otherwise known as OKRs. With the help of OKRs, companies like Google and nonprofits like the Gates Foundation have been able to transform the way they set goals to reach new heights."
Introduction
Imagine walking into a company where everyone from the CEO to the newest intern can tell you exactly what matters most this quarter. Where teams aren't spinning their wheels on busy work, but instead laser-focused on the few critical goals that will truly move the needle. Where transparency replaces politics, and ambitious dreams become achievable milestones. This isn't a utopian fantasy—it's the reality for organizations that have mastered the art of measuring what matters. At the heart of this transformation lies a deceptively simple system that has powered some of the world's most successful companies. From Google's meteoric rise to revolutionary healthcare initiatives saving millions of lives, the secret weapon isn't cutting-edge technology or unlimited resources—it's a disciplined approach to goal-setting that turns vision into execution. This system doesn't just change how organizations set goals; it fundamentally rewrites the relationship between ambition and achievement. Through this framework, you'll discover how to cut through the noise of competing priorities and channel your team's energy toward outcomes that truly matter. You'll learn how transparency and accountability can become your greatest competitive advantages, and how the right goals can transform not just performance, but entire organizational cultures.
Intel's Operation Crush: Focus That Conquers Markets
In late 1979, Intel faced an existential crisis that would have crushed lesser companies. Their dominance in the microprocessor market was crumbling as competitors like Motorola launched faster, more sophisticated chips. Sales were plummeting, customers were defecting, and the company that had invented the microprocessor was watching its own creation slip away. Then came a desperate eight-page telex from district sales manager Don Buckout, essentially screaming for help from the field. Within a week, this cry for help had reached Andy Grove, Intel's demanding president, who saw not just a problem, but an opportunity to prove what focused execution could achieve. Grove assembled a blue-ribbon task force with one audacious mission: win 2,000 design wins in a single year—essentially tripling their typical performance. They called it Operation Crush, and the name wasn't chosen lightly. As marketing director Jim Lally declared, "We have to kill Motorola, that's the name of the game." But this wasn't just corporate bravado; it was the beginning of one of the most precisely orchestrated goal-setting campaigns in business history. Every department, from engineering to marketing to sales, aligned behind specific, measurable objectives that rolled up to this singular, seemingly impossible goal. What made Operation Crush legendary wasn't the ambition alone—it was the systematic way Intel translated that ambition into daily action. Engineers had specific chip performance targets with exact delivery dates. Marketing had precise metrics for trade press coverage and customer education. The sales team knew exactly how many design wins they needed each month, with detailed tracking and support systems. Even the incentive structure was perfectly aligned: every salesperson would earn a trip to Tahiti, but only if the entire team hit their collective targets. No individual heroes—just coordinated excellence. The power of this approach lies in its ability to transform overwhelming challenges into manageable, interconnected objectives. When you're facing a crisis, it's tempting to panic and try everything at once. But Intel's discipline in defining exactly what success looked like, and exactly how they would achieve it, created a roadmap that every employee could follow. The result wasn't just victory—it was a masterclass in how proper goal-setting can align thousands of people toward a common purpose, turning potential chaos into coordinated breakthrough performance.
Google's Chrome Revolution: Stretching for Amazing
When Sundar Pichai stood before his team in 2008 with an impossible challenge—to build a web browser that would capture 20 million weekly users by year's end, starting from absolute zero—most observers would have called him delusional. The browser market was already crowded, dominated by established players, and Google was arriving painfully late to the party. But Pichai understood something profound about human potential: the right kind of impossible goal doesn't crush teams, it unleashes them. "We deliberately set the bar knowing it was a formidable stretch," he later reflected. "I thought there was no way we would get there. But I also considered it important to keep pushing to the limit of our ability and beyond." The Chrome team didn't just accept this moonshot—they dissected it into conquerable pieces. When they realized their JavaScript engine was too slow, they set another seemingly impossible target: make it ten times faster. Danish programmer Lars Bak looked at this challenge and calmly declared, "I can do something that is much, much faster." Within four months, he had JavaScript running ten times faster than Firefox. Within two years, it was twenty times faster. As Bak later admitted, "We sort of underestimated what we could do." This became Chrome's signature pattern: break impossible into possible, then exceed even those elevated expectations. What's remarkable about Chrome's journey wasn't just the technical achievements, but how the stretch goal fundamentally changed the team's approach to problem-solving. When they missed their Mac version deadline, they didn't lower expectations—they found new distribution channels. When user adoption stalled, they launched Google's largest offline marketing campaign in history, including the memorable "Dear Sophie" commercial that showed a father documenting his daughter's life through Chrome. Each setback became a catalyst for more creative solutions, more ambitious partnerships, more innovative approaches. The Chrome story reveals a counterintuitive truth about human motivation: we don't rise to meet reasonable expectations, we rise to meet meaningful challenges. When you set a goal so ambitious it requires rethinking everything you thought you knew, you force breakthrough thinking. You can't achieve 10x improvement through 10x effort alone—you need 10x innovation. This is why stretch goals aren't just about reaching higher numbers; they're about discovering capabilities you never knew you had and solutions you never thought to explore.
From Annual Reviews to Continuous Growth: The Adobe Story
Donna Morris found herself on a business trip to India in 2012, jet-lagged and frustrated with Adobe's soul-crushing annual performance review process. In a moment of unguarded honesty with a reporter, she declared that the company was planning to abolish annual reviews and stack rankings entirely. There was just one problem: she hadn't yet discussed this radical idea with her team or CEO. What should have been a career-limiting mistake instead became the catalyst for one of the most successful performance management transformations in corporate history. The numbers behind Adobe's old system were staggering and depressing in equal measure. Managers invested 80,000 hours annually—equivalent to 40 full-time employees—in a mechanical review process that satisfied no one and motivated even fewer. The system was so demotivating that voluntary turnover spiked every February as employees fled after receiving their annual "feedback." Morris realized they were spending enormous resources on a process that actively harmed the very people it was supposed to help. Her accidental announcement forced Adobe to confront an uncomfortable truth: their performance management system was performing against their interests. What replaced those dreaded annual reviews was something beautifully simple yet powerfully effective: regular "Check-in" conversations between managers and employees. Instead of waiting a full year to discuss performance, teams began having frequent, forward-looking discussions about goals, feedback, and career development. The conversation shifted from "How did you do last year?" to "What are you working on now, and how can I help you succeed?" Managers became coaches rather than judges, and employees became active participants in their own development rather than passive recipients of verdict-style feedback. The transformation wasn't just procedural—it was philosophical. Adobe moved from a culture of competition to one of collaboration, from backward-looking judgment to forward-looking development, from rigid rankings to flexible recognition of diverse contributions. The results spoke volumes: voluntary turnover dropped significantly, employee engagement soared, and managers reported feeling more effective in their roles. By replacing fear with frequent feedback, Adobe discovered that people don't need annual reviews to know where they stand—they need ongoing dialogue to know where they're going.
Summary
The most successful organizations don't just set goals—they create systems that transform ambition into achievement through disciplined focus, transparent alignment, continuous tracking, and the courage to stretch beyond perceived limitations. Start by identifying your own "Operation Crush" moment: that one critical objective where success would fundamentally change your trajectory, then build specific, measurable milestones that make the impossible feel inevitable. Replace your annual goal-setting ritual with quarterly cycles that allow for rapid adjustment and learning, because in today's fast-moving world, agility beats perfection every time. Transform your performance conversations from backward-looking judgments into forward-looking coaching sessions that happen regularly, not annually. Remember that stretch goals aren't about setting people up for failure—they're about discovering capabilities that only emerge under the pressure of meaningful challenge. The magic happens not in the goal itself, but in how you systematically break it down, track progress, and maintain alignment across your entire organization.
By John Doerr
