Game-changing Insights From John Doerr's 'Measure What Matters' Talk At Rice University!

please join me in giving a hearty welcome to Rice's own John Doerr well John thank you for coming and thank you for being so generous with your with your time and with your book and the first the first thing I'd like to ask you about is your time and your book you've you've you've built more than 200 companies your time is incredibly valuable why did you write a book well this is so we could get all these people together tonight actually thank you very much for your time this evening and I don't mean to evade

your question but I hope that some of the stories in this book are useful to you as they are to others and I think we're at really a critical moment a critical moment I think too many of our leaders and some of our great institutions are failing us in some cases it's because they're bad or unethical you know what I mean in too many other cases though our leaders are leading us to the wrong goals with terrible outcomes as a consequence and that has got to stop how we are going to write these wrongs how

we're going to course-correct I think it's one of the great challenges among two challenges for our generation and I believe the key is in choosing the right goals getting everybody in our institutions or organizations focused on those aligned around achieving them committed to doing them tracking our progress and then stretching for for amazing and stretching is perhaps the highest quality of a great goal-setting system we can look at places where goals have failed us look at Thera knows what if they had transparent goals look at Wells Fargo did they have the right goals look at

some of our public institutions I think there's never been a time more than now where it's clear that we need great leaders great culture and our institutions and if we have those two then something like this this goals system it's not a silver bullet but it can help it can really help take us to the mountaintop I've seen it happen well how did you learn about objectives and key results okay ours how did you come about learning that that's such a great question thank you you know I brought some pictures to share with you I'm

hoping I can get this to come up here here is one long-haired right student working on the r2 mainframe I had a lot to learn then and I was fortunate to to get a job working at a chip company called Intel I really was out in Silicon Valley trying to find my girlfriend who had dumped me and she had a job at Intel hadn't told me that and so when I got a summer job down the hall from her she about hit the roof she was not abused at all but today we've been married 40

years [Applause] the other great thing that happened to me while I was in until that summer is I got to work for Andy Grove who's how many of you know Andy Grove all right he's been called the greatest manager of his or any other era Hungarian emigres came to Silicon Valley with nothing and helped build the greatest semiconductor company that ever existed and to do that you had to get thousands of people to get lines that were a millionth of a meter a micron exactly right or nothing would work and so he invented this deceptively

simple system called okay ours and taught it to me and others I got a copy of his original slide set that's another story but I want to share with you a classic piece of video this is not readily available on the Internet this is Andy Grove teaching Intel executives about ok ours let's see yeah if we can make this go that's what ok ours are here he goes watch the Hungarian accent the two key phrases of the management by objective systems are the objectives and the key resolve and they match the two purposes the objective

is the direction the key result has to be measure but at the end you can look and without any arguments they did I do that they did I not do it yes no simple that's and eager for you yes no simple objectives or the direction their what I want to have accomplished the key results are how and it he called these systems the okay ours objectives are the one key results are the how the objectives and the key results and this this system is something that I then took from Andy Grove in Intel every place

I went when I left Intel in 1980 to help kleiner perkins start new companies and so the essence of an okay are how would you describe it what makes a good objective what makes a good key result well the objectives that are long-lasting they're intended to be truly significant concrete action-oriented to be sure but inspirational that's what I want to have accomplished it may take some period of time to achieve that key results you'll remember or how I'm gonna get it done and so those are specific and time-bound aggressive but realistic and above all else

measurable and verifiable in fact it's one of my prized pupils Marissa Mayer would say if it doesn't have a number it's not a key result those are objectives and key results so I think many of us learn best when we hear stories could you tell us a story about one of the companies that uses successfully let's maybe start with Google sure in in 19 1989 1999 1999 I took this system to to Stanford computer science dropouts there 24 years old here in their garage and I showed him Andy Grove slide set this is a Larry

Page you'll recognize and Sergey Brin there were just a couple dozen Googlers I just written the largest check I ever had in my life it's like four twelve million dollars for thirteen percent of Google it was outrageous and at the end of my pitch I said okay guys what do you think and and I I was hoping I'd get real enthusiasm for adopting this Larry didn't have anything to say what what Sergey said was well we don't have any better way to manage this company so we'll give this a try and I took that as

a ringing endorsement and here's why it's because every quarter since then every Googler every quarter 70,000 of them today has written down her objectives and key results posted them on an internal website graded them and then tossed them aside they're not used for bonuses they're not used for promotions they have a higher purpose they are the collective commitment the calling of the entire aligned organization and it's remarkable to me that these have never leaked this photo of Larry and Sergey it's on page five in your book but maybe more telling is that the the leadership

of Google says they can't imagine running the company without this way of prioritizing setting goals remember I said it gets you focus alignment commitment tracking and stretching well Larry Page is the high priest of stretch goals of 10x goals and the way he puts it is I'd rather have my team aim for Mars and if they fall short I still know we're gonna get to the moon so when you grade these inside Google a really good grade is 70% if you get a hundred percent of your key results done you were probably sandbagging and if

you only get 40 percent that's another kind of problem so Google is the biggest best large company using these so so if we can see how it works in a large company can you talk to us a little bit about scaling this down maybe to the size of a smaller company like some of the people in the audience might be running sure because what works for large companies can work for small ones too and I've seen this work well beyond company one story I want to tell you is about a remarkable entrepreneur who's transforming the

healthcare industry her name is Jeanie Kim her company's name is nuna and they set out to build a better medical claims database for large employer and self-insured employers her her brother key mom is an epileptic autistic lives at home with her and he is a Medicaid beneficiary so along the way they got wind of a really historic project being built a monster effort to make the country's first database ever after 50 years of all 70 million Medicaid members beneficiaries and so forth her company at the time was tiny was just six people what did she

do she didn't blink she stepped up and said I'm gonna bid for that contract because of chemo and the difference it would make for all Medicaid beneficiaries and I'm gonna win it and then when she won the contracts she used okay ours to set her goals to recruit 60 more people to meet the security standards and to deliver the whole project on time on budget that stories in this book as well it's a powerful story because they struggled when you start using a system like this for setting goals I say you have to build goal

muscle it takes time and more than anything else it takes the commitment of the leaders but as you suggested this is not just a system for startups small for-profit companies or large ones it can also make a big difference in in nonprofits and I want to tell you one more story there if I can you'd think that an Irish rock star would be an unlikely practitioner of objectives and key results but sure enough Paul Hewson who goes by Bono practicing Catholic used okay ours uses okay ours for his nonprofit called one and they set some

really gorgeous objectives like forgive all the non-performing third-world debt or eliminate mother-to-child transmission of AIDS and this book tells the key results that went along with it and there was concern that it would stifle creativity that people would lose their passion because of this structure and I think what he has to say about it is is particularly compelling let me let me see if I can bring that up here also so you're passionate how passionate what actions does your passion need you to do if the heart doesn't find a perfect rhyme with the head then

your passion means nothing the okay or framework cultivates the madness the chemistry contained inside it it gives us an environment for risk for trust or failing is not a fireable offense and when you have that sort of structure and environment and the right people magic is around the corner I love this he says the OKR framework cultivates the madness gives people permission to fail it and when you have the right people and the right goals well magic is just right around the corner so this can work for large organizations for start-up organizations for nonprofits it's

it's not a silver bullet but it's a pretty powerful system and those and nine other stories are in this this book I'd like to say it's not a business book it it's really a handbook it's a it's a guide to having your teams do better we know you just use the word love and when you look at these organizations that have been built using okay ours whether it's noon or Google or Bono's Foundation their dreams you know they're they're really people's dreams so what what's your dream for okay ours and goals and this this effort

that you've put together yeah so I've been called the Johnny Appleseed of okay ours because everywhere I go with Willy Loman like with my slide show I try to share it with people and they may or may not use it or adapt it but my my my dream here is that we can take okay ours my dream here is that you will join me in this movement and that we can take okay ours beyond our businesses even beyond our nonprofits to some institutions that really matter like to our families to our schools to our hospitals

even to our governments you you can use these to set personal objectives and key results and the truth of the matter is I think many of us are setting goals the wrong way and most of us are not doing it at all so getting the right goals for the right reason is an enormous ly important job for leaders to do and for us as citizens to expect to the institution's we want to rely on so you've taken this system and others have taken it and used it and you now walk in this valley of tech

giants Silicon Valley Amazon Google these huge companies with with what we I think now we would argue is really great leadership in most cases can you tell us how they got there can you tell us the commonality among those great leaders and those giant tech companies and yeah I'd like to do that and and I just want to underscore the point about how recently how important some would say powerful or valuable these companies have become these are ones that kleiner perkins has invested in on behalf of the rice endowment I hasten to add but but

that's not the main point I think the point and this slides already out of date is that look at the change between 2010 and 2014 in deed this date is already wrong because Microsoft is just now the most valuable company in the so I want to tell you a little story about three of these about Amazon than Google and then Apple and how their leaders built their organizations to be super valuable because there's lessons in there for all of us you know most people like to think of those are the three amazon as an e-commerce

giant but I think a better way to look at it is if it's a very large data center that happens to have some small attached stores to it the Amazon Cloud business now is two-thirds of the market value of the company and among the many lessons from Jeff's leadership are how disciplined he is in messaging how focused he is how he'll seed experiments with a very long view to what matters decisions are made around documents called six pagers he won't assume that anyone's prepared for a meeting so if it's an important decision there'll be a

study hall at the beginning to review those and try to get everyone on the same page so it's a it's a juggernaut he's a remarkable principled long view leader and a company that's like all of these tech giants generating a lot more controversy the basis of antitrust law in our country is whether or not harm has been done to consumers it's hard to argue that Amazon is harm consumers but there is a movement underfoot to say they're just too powerful and therefore we should break them up it'll be interesting to see how those conversations go

the next story I wanted to tell you about is these two Googlers Larry and Sergey you know they had a simple goal which was to make all the world's information available to anybody anytime anywhere for free a pretty lofty goal objective and then they supported that with all these key results Larry and Sergey really changed how advertising his button sold before they arrived on the scene people put most of their money in television ads nobody knew what worked prices were negotiated over three-martini lunch at Madison Avenue and they said this is crazy we're gonna change

all this and so and they invented this thing called Adwords and said you only pay for an ad if it clicks through that it performs we'll have an auction to figure out what the fair price is and the winner of the auction will only pay the second highest price a modified queen's auction which the economist will tell us guarantees liquidity in a marketplace and just last year online advertising in the US was bigger than television advertising so I'd say their experiment worked or or this Google thing it it certainly has potential I'm particularly interested in

the effect they might have on healthcare 4% of the searches on Google every day are related to health care that's a hundred and twenty million searches per day who says Americans who says people around the world don't care a lot about getting more and better information on their health but I think my favorite story of all three of these has to do with Steve Jobs who you'll recall in 1976 invented the personal computer that's when we first met I was there when he held up the motherboard for the Apple one and then he announced the

Macintosh in 1984 in an 85 at the age of 30 the Apple board fired Steve Jobs and the company went downhill fast in fact they were within two quarters of bankruptcy having cycled through a couple CEOs when Steve returned they needed a new operating system and he staged the largest ever non-hostile takeover of a public company he got everybody on the board to resign he stepped in he had to lay off about half the people streamlined the product lines and focused them on the iPod and some simpler computer product lines I was walking around the

neighborhood with Steve one Sunday afternoon we were going to our our daughter's soccer match he pulled that he never did he never did this with me he pulled this thing out of his blue jeans and he said to me John this the iPhone one almost killed our company I said what do you mean he's NASA he said it has in it five radios five radios Wi-Fi Bluetooth CSMA GSM and another one that I can't think of at the moment he said it's really hard to do that I turned it over like Tom's doing and I

looked at the back side Tom what does it say on the back there iPhone what's the number there's no number and in the little box 8 gig 8 gigs I said Steve holy crap you've got 8 gigabytes of memory in this it's the first time that had happened and I couldn't what are you gonna do with all that he said I'll put in 10 thousand movies and a hundred thousand songs I said no let's have entrepreneurs put programs in this and he came right back at me and said no I am NOT interested in having

third parties pollute my phone with their applications and sure enough in 2006 at the started the mobility era there was no App Store so I said the steam you changed your mind please call back because I'd like to fund these entrepreneurs and sure enough in the spring around February of 2007 I got a call and he said come on down to Cupertino let's talk about making a fund to fund the apps that will be available in this App Store so he was strong-willed he was clear on what not to do he was clearly open-minded because

he changed his mind he spun on a dime after he saw the efforts of entrepreneurs to jailbreak this phone and today there's 2.2 million apps in the App Store over a hundred billion dollars of revenues to entrepreneurs and that's Steve announcing the App Store and the iPhone to go along with it what do we take away from all this for leaders and for leadership strong-willed visionary passionate founders who are very clear about what they need to do and not do they take a long view of their business and couple that in a paradoxical way with

a sense of urgency about the present the here and now they don't wait for marketeers or poles to tell them what to do no place bets and they'll stick with things for the long run I think that's the story of entrepreneurship and the story of entrepreneurial leaders whether they're in large or small organizations so you meet with entrepreneurs and you know they hope that kleiner perkins supports their their endeavors and you've only got a very small piece of time to make the kind of determination that you just described how do you do it that quickly

well one of the first things I try to decide is what I mind getting in trouble with this entrepreneur because my experience has been across 200 companies every time we get into trouble and and and after I clear that threshold then I'm interested in really two fundamental questions the people who it is they are and how they're thinking about their team and the product market because they both matter I'd say one of the great things about venture capital is you can only lose one times your money which I have done many many times but when

you have a venture that really works you can offset those losses you can make many more times your money and it's a very hard thing to start a new company there's lots of entrepreneurs I work with who wouldn't choose to do that job if they had another choice but they're deeply committed to their their vision and their team and their stakeholders so you've given us some great stories about tech history but what your judgment has developed around is the ability to see forward and you know some people theorize that Tech initiatives are you know tech

advances come in leaps the 13 year mmm tsunami the big changes where if you get on the top of that wave you know you really wind up where you want to be in on the beach so can you tell us a little bit about that cyclical nature of tech advancement and you know how you view that yeah we did a study we looked back on this and it was quite remarkable I don't know if you'll find it as astonishing as I do but it looks like technology tsunamis really monster revolutions happen in 13 years cycles

and I'm gonna take us all back to well 1980 roughly and show you the start of the first one which was the personal computer not the Apple but the IBM PC really burst on the scene powered by Moore's Law Moore's law the doubling of transistors every two years is what made this possible and for all the kind of credit that Silicon Valley would like to take for its innovation the truth is everybody out there me included all of us are benefiting from the incredible power of something that doubles every two years someone said if that

happened to our automobiles they'd cost a few pennies we wouldn't even bother to park them because we could replace them given the economic power there that's what's been driving microchips so that's 1980 fast-forward 13 years later what happened next well Marc Andreessen published the web browser at Netscape company a company we were fortunate to back and suddenly the infor internet made information free abundant and ubiquitous so from 93 for 13 more years through 2006 we got Amazon we got Google we got fundamental changes in the way we live play entertain conduct commerce govern ourselves even

run our elections then we get to 2006 what happened then not one but two tsunamis the first was this mobile phone we entered the era of mobility this phone I'm holding in my hands now is the most profitable product ever created it made Apple the most valuable and he ever in the world didn't exist when Steve returned to Apple but that wasn't the only big deal the second trend was towards the cloud and that made computing and storage unlimited essentially and I can't imagine the smartphone without the cloud to power it so 2006 13 more

years brings us to 2019 what's next any guesses show hands yes sir artificial intelligence he's got it right in my opinion I mean who knows but artificial intelligence a field that's been overhyped for long witness IBM and Watson under-delivered but now I think is coming back and it will have profound effects on every field of data especially healthcare there's other answers you could give the blockchain crypto currencies and so forth but I'm pretty confident that AI is a profoundly important race China might win the race to dominate the AI future we need to change our

attitudes towards R&D and towards immigration if we're going to be competitive in this new and important wave so what do you think is probably the most promising technological advancement or piece of tech hardware that we have to work with right now I think the most important tech innovation is in batteries battery breakthroughs I think batteries are the microprocessor of the renewable era I'm back six battery companies two of them have failed already a third one probably will but one of them one of them I don't mean that casually we're in there fighting for them to

win but one of them appears to have tripled the energy density of lithium-ion batteries the very best of them and batteries are not made of rare earth elements generally there made of stuff that's abundant in the ground so they cost whatever they we and what that means is if you triple the energy density of a battery it only cost a third of what a comparable lithium-ion one would and if you look at an electric vehicle like a Tesla the largest cost item is the battery now if you can cut that to a third of what

it was and furthermore it's the heaviest thing that's what you're hauling around that's a third you get a kind of compound effect here that isn't 1/3 times 1/3 almost a one-tenth improvement it's more like 1/6 but it's profound it's a game-changer in fact it would mean that internal combustion vehicles in India would cost the same as electric vehicles in India and Tesla's would no longer be toys for rich boys it would be the way we move people around our planet it would address a major source of global warming global warming gases so another piece of

tech hardware I'm pretty excited about is a breakthrough in lidar and radars that'll see further and be cheaper for autonomous vehicles self-driving vehicles the electrification and automation of transportation I think is a really large powerful and optimistic trend for the planet so some technological innovations and inventions seem to have promised but then they fall into a fairly narrow niche and a good example of that would be the Segway Personal Transporter we see one of my famous failures with but I mean it did it has it has achieved some promise because it is in these niches

where it's doing something that nothing else can do but it also didn't develop widespread popularity how how do you hone your judgment to avoid that trap well one thing you should do is be careful about opening your mouth I have forecasted that Segway would be the fastest company into a billion dollars in revenues ever because they were bidding on a contract at the time with the US Postal Service to replace 30 percent of the postal workers through better productivity they could retire earlier with these segways and it turned out the Postal Union wasn't very excited

about that but I think Segway would have been great they just got the wheels in the wrong orientation this notion that we would use scooters to get around urban settings I think does have a great deal of potential Segway failed because the product was over engineered it was over designed it missed its cost mark and there's a lot more stories to tell about that but I'll leave it there terrific so you describe to us some of the the key leadership indicators that you look for in company leadership what do you do when you find a

person that has a terrific idea that you would love to back but you feel that they are just not capable of leading that company in the way that it'll achieve what its potential is yes so what I do forgive me he's talked with them about it we have a conversation about what their dream is what their objectives are what kind of team do they want to build how far do they think they can and will take the company on it I never want to deny somebody's ability to to grow Larry Page started as a CEO

of Google and everybody agreed we should bring an Eric Schmidt to be the CEO develop Larry further in ten years later Larry returned to be the CEO of alphabet now Google's so I I think it's just a matter of being straight straightforward talking it through so changing gears just a little bit you and Ann have been very generous to rice in many ways including our service on the board of trustees and assisting with connections to people of influence and you've also helped establish the rice Center for engineering leadership and then subsequently the the Institute for

new leaders why have you chosen to express your generosity in creating leader development enterprises well I said at the outset I think it bears repeating that I think there's very few problems in our world that can't be better addressed with better leaders my mantra it's in this book and in other places is that I worship at the altar of ideas I'm a rice electrical engineer for Christ's sakes you know I'm a technology junky I carry four or five smartphones until all all these new devices are really incredible but relatively speaking ideas are easy execution is

everything I can't tell you the number of ventures great ideas that have failed because they can't actually ideas are easy executions everything and for most endeavors it takes a team to win you may the lung be the lone exception you may be Einstein and can change the world just thinking about it but for most of us we're on teams and we organize into teams so I'd rather back people in programs than bricks and mortar I'd like to empower and unlock Ann and I both want to unlock human potential we had the benefit when we were

at Rice of being part of an amazing array of leadership experiences and entrepreneurial programs I'll tell you one more thing David David Lee Burton invited me to give a commencement address at Rice and usually you know business people come and they talk about all their lessons learned and their accomplishments and so forth and it said I've asked could I talk with a couple dozen Rice undergrads and I asked them what was on their mind they're concerned about their career getting a job who might be their life's partner and so my talk a kind of fuzzy

version of it is on the web was all about making these decisions that fundamentally turn on how we make meaning how love figures in to these and as I talked with the student's incredibly bright people I noticed that almost all of them were inarticulate they kind of looked down at their feet instead of looking at me there were some exceptions but these were the best and the brightest and I thought you know you're judged on your ability to think and speak on your feet what if we conducted an experiment of an experiment and considerable scale

that would involve some training but most of all some coaching to develop better leaders I had the chance today to meet with another couple dozen grad students undergrad students who are part of this new Leaders program they were spectacular so it's more than an experiment I think it's a it's a it's a why's that but I think we'll see three four or five years from now in controlled measured studies that the rice undergrads and grads who chose to be part of these various leadership activities are gonna be making a bigger difference in the world that's

not to say everybody needs to be a leader and I think there's lots of leadership styles sometimes the best leader is facilitating the group doing well but the offer at Rice is for every undergrad and for every grad if you want to be a leader if you'd like to get outside your comfort zone we'll find you a customized coach who will meet with you a professional coach not some other student who will meet with you six times a year and help you develop your leader identity that's that's what's underway here at this great University and

I can't wait to see how it turns out just listen pulling this off has been our for me an impressive accomplishment first of all David Lieberman said this is part of our strategy I really want to do this this is not being done at any other university in the world and then we conducted a more than year-long search with the very best recruiter I know a global search to find Tom this amazing leader West Point general Yale Business School professor and he came here and he got the whole rights community behind the program it's not

a foreign kind of antibody I'm gonna help the drama department or the literature department having better more successful graduates and so it's looking really good and it's I think it's a it's an important effort I I hope a decade from now Rice is known as the finest University with whose graduates are the greatest leaders in our country and other places around the world and that our program is copied that it spreads that we infect all the other great universities because like I said we need more great so if you can if you can imagine just

for a moment the perspective on leadership of someone who's really I mean they've only been alive 19 years you know the vast majority of their political observations have happened in the last four years you know they they haven't had in all instances the finest leadership role models in our history and many of the students that my team talks to are somewhat hesitant to approach the notion of being a leader what would you tell a young person who may not see themselves as leaders may not see that as an aspirational goal for themselves when in fact

it's going to help them later on so I would say a few things and these are out of your PlayBook first of all there's many different styles of leadership sometimes it's the knight in white armor that's charging over the over the wall leading leading leading the charge but other times it's the facilitator at the base of the wall that's helping to boost members of the team over the top one of my great role models in life is improv interesting thing about improv is no one's in charge and yet everybody in the cast is at risk

and they've got each other's backs and they're building their extemporizing as they go along it's a very powerful social business meme and one I think that shows that there can be all kinds of leaders we need diverse leaders we need more leaders we need leaders who are dedicated and devoted to teams so you've you've talked a lot about leader flexibility and you know some of the finest leaders in in business and in nonprofits and so forth does John doar have a leadership style do you have a particular way that you are most comfortable leading and

being generative with other people's goals and yeah I do I think I'm an enthusiastic optimistic I'm a persuader in fact we did our family did a family retreat let's look at our different styles of communications recently and I've ended up in this upper quadrant a couple of my daughters are more analytical thoughtful deliberate peacemakers but I'm I think the way to make meaning in life is in your through your relationships with others and my dad was my mentor and role model and then an entrepreneur and I was very blessed when he said you know John

we're gonna give you one thing fine education now family business no inheritance anything of that sort because nobody can ever take that away from you and for me that education culminated at this great University rice and so it's a real privilege to be back here and have so many of you are wondering when this is going to end you know one of the things that that our team has been really impressed with as we work with rice students whether it's highly technical biochemists and and physicists to the poets and and others on the end of

the spectrum is that they are all creative I mean they are all creative and when we think of okay ours when we think of a of a goal-setting strategy that's got some rigidity and measurement to it we haven't talked much about creativity can can you explain how okay ours can be used in concert with highly creative people who are who are coming up with new ideas and may chafe a bit at the structure that okay ours Pring sure so there's something some of the most creative people in organizations that I know fully embrace these because

it creates a culture where it's okay to fail in fact at Google X in the moonshot Factory they celebrate failures they do everything they can to take on an audacious project and then prove why it won't work so they can free up their resources to go do the next thing whether it's self-driving car or a helium balloon called loon or what else has come out of that now self-balancing spoons for people with Parkinson's it's it's it's too bad there aren't great research laboratories more of them in American companies the way there were when we had

Bell Labs but it it is the case it is what it is and we've just got to argue for more R&D funding for great universities i I think bono heard it put it really well okay ours can cultivate the madness of a creative organization give it a purpose and cause magic to occur one more thing this book says and I haven't talked about it at all is that okay ours aren't the complete story if you think of a football game they're like the goal posts that's the objective and the 10-yard markers those are the key

results as we march our way to that objective but in a football game the goal posts and the 10-yard markers are not even the main thing the main thing there's the Huddle's there's the plays there's the player substitution there's there's there's morale and so these we call CFR's for conversations feedback and recognition and one of the chapters here is about adobe ditching the annual performance review this idea that the right way to give feedback to millennials is to wait a year then dredge up all the old emails and write them an out-of-date backward looking report

you know what happens when you do that they quit so the more modern thing to do the smarter thing to do is to have more frequent real-time feedback from your boss to orient your conversations around these goals recognize success and you know what happens you get better performance it really works so while you were in Silicon Valley you really saw a transformation of that that entire geographic area into a very generative forward-looking producing area we have a number of people from the Houston business community audience right now who are interested in Houston playing a much

more significant role in entrepreneurship and in particularly tech entrepreneurship what kind of suggestions would you have or what kind of observations would you have about Houston going through a similar transformation so that the Houston ten years from now is a little different than we see Houston today so here's what I observe about the great centers of entrepreneurship in our country and by the way I think there's never been a better time than now to to drive for the development of places beyond Silicon Valley and in Boston in New York as my friend Steve Case says

the rise of the rest but in every case where there's been one of these ecosystems built its clustered around a great University and so the people in this room ought to ask is Rice doing its job what more can this is David Lee burns favorite question what more can we be doing to have rice be the great University and then what does it take well it takes entrepreneurs it takes entrepreneurial capital do we have angel funds do we have seed funds do we have entrepreneurial role models do we who are maybe not in an entrepreneurial

business take the risk of buying products from a start-up in the Houston area as opposed to the safe buy some things say on Amazon have we set clear objectives and key results for developing our entrepreneurial economy I'm completely convinced Houston can do this in Texas can do this I witnessed it I was part of compact computer compact had the largest first year revenues of any new company ever to this point 111 million dollars founded by some engineers out of Texas Instruments we can do this absolutely we can we need a strategy we need some leaders

we need everybody to work on it can we do it with okay ours yeah we can do it with okay ours and we ought it do want to take any questions from the audience or what what sir maybe we'll take one right here education yeah maybe restate that I want to restate the question everybody here one of the area's being transformed today is education by technology John what are you saying - the rice board about those changes I know this I think the rice board is more thoughtful about this than I am so I'm not

gonna grandstand off this stage and try to tell them what to do there's no doubt that broadly speaking higher education cost too much it's not accessible to enough people all around the world and the leaders are finding ways to make their brand and their curriculum attractive and pervasive to the advantage of their programs that are based on campus my wife Ann is the board chair of Khan Academy they have like 10 million monthly unique people getting supplemental education I serve on the board at Coursera which I believe is a leader in partnering with online higher

education more degreed programs from Carnegie Mellon straight up full engineering computer science degrees available for a fraction of what the on campus program cost I would say as David Lieberman would say let's do more let's be more aggressive let's be risk-taking let's be a leader not a follower there's another question here so what is your question okay so the question is how who had leaders like me engage with the developing world like Africa beyond philanthropy dealing with AIDS which the one organization and honestly the US has done or Bush has done a remarkable thing with

PEPFAR it's a program and the answer I think is invest Africans don't want aid they want investment dollars they can build grow their own economy in their vision and and I think that's happening not fast enough I'll say one more thing we can do I think the region of the world that's gonna pay the highest price for the generational problem that we've not yet confronted is Africa and that's global warming a hundred million people in Africa will die of starvation because of extreme changes in climate they're least responsible for this problem they're least able to

do something about it and they're just not going to be able to grow food how our generation comes to terms with the challenge of global warming is a problem I'm deeply concerned about investing in but basically I think we're screwed I think the engineer in me tells me that this problem is the integral of all the greenhouse gases we put out up in the atmosphere and we better get on it so I'll ask the last question and okay so great question you got the book what else are you gonna do John to make people more

aware of this well I created a website called what matters.com I recommend you write that down what matters dot-com because it has more stories and that's a place we're going to put training materials so you can become a volunteer in this movement think of Sheryl Sandberg's lean in movement I think the movement to hold our institutions that really matter to us accountable to make them more successful whether there are families with personal objectives or or like how we deal with Ebola is one worth you investing your time in I think I'm gonna infect I know

I'm gonna do a second edition of this book the greatest throwaway without a doubt is television but the Internet has a lot of power as well we've sold a couple hundred thousand copies of the book there been two and a half million views of a TED talk about it and I really didn't write the book to try to sell a lot of books I just thought it it would be useful because I was pretty dissatisfied with how effective my conversations my slide my slide show was you know you can send a note to me and

everyone can for that matter to John at what matters.com and if you are your nonprofit or something draw up some objectives and key results you want to email them in the eye on a small team of people will offer you feedback on them I'll just say one more thing about this with respect to families Anna and I had an objective to have a healthy family and we read that okay ours know we read that family dinners have a lot to do with that and so I said a key result with my team which was to

be home for dinner by 6:30 20 nights a month and to be fully present to put these things away and you know what that was a really stretch goal I'll leave it at that thank you very much I want to thank don't go anywhere I wanna thank John and Tom very truly extraordinary evening I I think as you've already heard John and Ann have just had a remarkable effect on our University and what we are able to achieve and raised our aspirations in terms of cultivating leadership on our campus and I want to ask Ann

to come out because the paraphrase Hamilton I was in the room where it happened and so I can tell you that Ann had every bit as much to do with this idea as John and and now provides us guidance but I want to make a small complaint and try to correct it a little little bit which is you've you've really written a wonderful book of stories and you've reached back a little bit in in time but but maybe not far enough because I think there's one story that you're missing from the book and that is

in many ways the story of Rice University and our extraordinary founding leader who I am positively sure had an exemplary set of okay ours to launch this University and so we'd like to take this occasion just so you don't forget in your next book to present to both of you and thanks for the extraordinary influence if you've had no this is a this is an exact replica of a statue of Edgar Odell loved it who as you may recall William arch white society he didn't want anything done until last after he had passed away passed

away it may be a little earlier than he anticipated as a result of a famous murder but it was a girdle of it who basically was a university entrepreneur and launched this university and we think that is they may be an early story of the power of okay arts and leadership and we just want to thank you for what you've contributed was thank you very much please in honor of Ann and john-boy [Applause] you