Last updated: March 17, 2022
Are you laser-focused on success metrics?
Do you know what your life goals and business objectives are?
Measure What Matters by John Doerr helped me realize that maybe I don’t know what my goals are, and maybe I’m not ready for an intense OKR process just yet.
Our Business Book Club read this and met about it in October 2018.
Objectives and Key Results (OKR)
OKRs are the goals that we define and assign.
- An OKR culture is an accountable culture.
- Leaders who operate using OKRs are focused, solemn, and sober.
- They have a foundation of discipline.
Book Club Meeting
We met in a large conference room office space near 5th Avenue and 26th Street.
This meeting had many firsts for us, including the first time:
- Meeting at night (all prior book clubs have been in the morning)
- We watched a video (see below)
- We had handouts (see below PDFs)
- We tried breakout groups
I’d rate my skills facilitating this book club as a 6/10. I tried a lot of new things, and they didn’t all work. Failure is OK because we keep evolving.
Resources Used
To talk about Measure What Matters, we tried to go beyond the book. The first way we did that was by watching a few minutes of this TED Talk by the author, John Doerr.
TED Talk by John Doerr
Watch the TED talk on YouTube here: Why the secret to success is setting the right goals | John Doerr
Picture: Watching John Doerr’s TED Talk
Handouts and Case Studies
I made up two different handouts for our book club review of Measure What Matters.
You can print the links below to do the same.
ALL TALK: PERFORMANCE CONVERSATIONS
Continuous performance management is a two-part, interwoven process. The first part consists of setting OKRs; the second entails regular and ongoing conversations, tailored to your needs. Use (this document) to plan and have more effective conversations with your team.
No one has more collective experience in implementing OKRs than Google… Use (this document) to understand how one very effective organization has used OKRs to achieve audacious goals—and to inspire your own approach.
Conclusion
Sadly, I didn’t like this book as much as the other books that we’ve read in our business book club.
I have friends who use OKRs at bigger organizations, and I bet they’d like this book.
But for me, Measure What Matters seemed too far-reaching or complicated for my current scrappy, entrepreneurial mindset.
The resource that I enjoyed the most was the Performance Conversations worksheet. It inspired me to think of better 1:1 questions for my colleagues and friends.