[Music] John Doerr author of the book measure what matters says for anyone striving for high performance in the workplace goals are very necessary things in the book door shares a goal-setting system that he learned at Intel door taught this goal-setting system to Google back when Google was a 30-person company and now Google's 80 plus thousand employees use the system every day startups like MyFitnessPal and zoom say they wouldn't have survived if it wasn't for doors goal setting system and Bono the rock star turned humanitarian says the goal setting system is a frame to hang your
passion on the powerful goal-setting system that these productive and inspiring people and organizations are referring to is the okay our goal-setting system okay R stands for objective and key results the objective is what you want to achieve the key results are how you're going to achieve it Larry Page co-founder of Google says as much as I hate process good ideas with great execution or how you make magic and that's where okay ours come in the magic of okay ours is created by three main ingredients let me show you how these three ingredients come together to
create the okay our goal-setting system that you can use to bring your biggest ideas to life okay our ingredient number one an audacious objective James Cameron director of Avatar Titanic two of the highest-grossing films of all time says if you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure you will fail above everyone else's success imagine you are an engineer and you set a ridiculously high goal of developing a battery that would have double the life and half the weight of a conventional battery you believe you could do it but you only managed to make
a battery that lasts 10 percent longer it was only 10 percent lighter than a conventional battery you technically failed but in the process of failing you learn a great deal about battery technology and develop valuable skills and now Tesla wants to hire you the first step of the okay our system is to set an objective with the same spirit that JFK set the objective of going to the moon in the 1960s JFK didn't pick the audacious objective of going to the moon because it was easy he picked it because it was hard he picked it
because that objective would serve to organize and measure the very best of the American people to set a moonshot like objective that will inspire you and force you to expand your skills start by being idealistic not realistic ask yourself questions like if I were freed from constraints and had unlimited resources what change would I want to make in the world or if I had a unique opportunity to be the best in the world at one thing what would that be when you come up with your ideal objective scale it back until it's one step short
of being impossible you want your goal to be big but believable when the Gates Foundation started they had the objective of eradicating malaria by 2015 but soon they realized that that was an impossible goal that demotivated the team so they adjusted their objective to eradicate malaria by 2040 the goal was still big but now it was believable now it inspired the team the first step you need to take in developing an OKR is creating a big audacious objective that captures your imagination and compels you to grow okay our ingredient number two quality and quantity key
results John Doerr says objectives are the stuff of inspiration and Far Horizons key results are more earthbound and metric driven your key results are the three to five things that you can improve that would indicate that you're getting closer to your objective key results are focused on things like revenue growth active users customer satisfaction scores and any other thing that would indicate progress that you can measure here's an example from the book of week average and strong key results let's say you and your race car team had the objective of winning the Indy 500 week
key results would be increased lap speed and reduced pitstop time-average key results would be increased average speed by 2 percent and reduce average pitstop time by 1 second these key results are better because they're specific and measurable but strong key results would be increased average lap speed by 2 percent reduce average pitstop time by 1 second reduce pitstop errors by 50 percent and practice pit stops one hour a day these key results aren't just specific and measurable they also contain a mix of quantity and quality key results to make sure the team isn't cutting corners
to reach your objective if you were building a software application developing 3 new features might be good quantity key result but the application might be written with sloppy code and lead to more hours of work that's why it's important to include a quality key result like having fewer than 5 bugs per feature in quality assurance testing I like to think of key results as the gauges on the dashboard of the vehicle these gauges provide specific values that you can monitor and inform you if you're going to get to your destination on time for your vehicle
to get you to the destination you want to increase your speed while monitoring your rpm and your oil temperature to make sure your motor won't break down while pursuing your objective ok our ingredient number 3 color coding check-ins bono is the lead singer for the band u2 and as one foundation has helped deliver nearly 50 billion dollars in funding for health initiatives across Africa his organization has been able to significantly reduce corruption across Africa and channel money from African oil reserves to fight extreme poverty Bono says the okay are traffic lights the color coding system
has transformed the one foundation's board meetings they've sharpened our strategy our execution our results they made us a more effective weapon in the fight against extreme poverty the okay our color coding system works as follows each week month or quarter you look at your key results and label each result green yellow or red green means that you are 70 to 100 percent on target and you should simply keep doing what you're doing yellow means you're 30% to 70 on target and you need to develop a recovery plan if you had a key result for your
business that included increasing the number of subscribers on your YouTube channel by 50% in the next three months but you've only increased 5% after the first month you need to adjust your strategy this could involve making new types of videos or collaborating with other YouTube creators back to the colors if you have a red key result you are 0 to 30% on target and you need to either develop a recovery plan or replace that key result altogether John Doerr says there's no need to hold stubbornly to an outdated projection strike it off your list and
move on our goals are servants to our purpose not the other way around but here's the surprising thing about the color coding system if your key results are always green and you're approaching a hundred percent complete you've done something wrong at Intel door says if a department so much as approached a hundred percent it was presumed to be setting its sights too low and there would be hell to pay so if you're finding it easy to get all your key results in the green zone adjust their difficulty so you get a mix of green and
yellow by using this color coding system you're held accountable for both setting challenging goals and making progress on those goals so if you want to accomplish something significant something that matters turn your goal into an audacious objective that inspires you then find a mix of three to five quality and quantity key results that you can measure then periodically apply colors to those key results to continually challenge and hold yourself accountable that was the core message that I gathered from measure what matters by John Doerr I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to raise
her performance and lead their team's more effectively if you would like a one-page PDF summary of insights that I gathered from this book just click the link below and I'd be happy to email it to you if you already subscribe to the free productivity game email newsletter this PDF is sitting in your inbox if you like this video please share it and as always thanks for watching and have yourself a productive week
