The Mantra Behind OKRs

From John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs (Portfolio/Penguin, 2018). The book opens in the fall of 1999, a few months after Doerr invested in Google and joined its board. As he tells it, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had big ideas but no management experience. Doerr writes that he reveres entrepreneurs, but that he had watched too many startups “struggle with growth and scale and getting the right things done.” The line is the “mantra” he came to as a result. He arrived at Google with what he calls a gift: OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), a goal-setting system he presented to the founders and roughly thirty other early employees, nearly the whole company at the time.

Doerr brought the system from Intel. He first used it in the 1970s as a young engineer there, working under Andy Grove, whom he calls “the greatest manager of his or any era.” In a 2018 TED talk, Doerr recalled Grove telling him, “John, it almost doesn’t matter what you know. Execution is what matters the most.”

As a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, Doerr spread Grove’s system to fifty or more companies before he brought it to Google.