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I laughed. I can go glass half-full or empty on OKR's. They obviously have value, but using OKR's at Google is one of the biggest selection biases possible. Go
by heymijo 8y ago
I laughed.
I can go glass half-full or empty on OKR's. They obviously have value, but using OKR's at Google is one of the biggest selection biases possible. Google seems to have done so many things in its history that would be death for other org's.
The episode about firing all managers is a great in-depth story of stupidity. Yet Google succeeded because they had and have an absolute lock on the search market.
Dear Doerr, convince me about OKR's another way.
I would also love to see what OKR's looked like throughout some of the products at Google that they have sunset or flopped. G+, RSS, Wave, Hangouts, etc.
- OKR's are a useful tool but they aren't what made Google a $750 billion company.
- iamleppert 8y agoI only jest because I did see John speak and give a presentation about his OKR system while I was working at Airware (now defunct). I was just fresh from LinkedIn, where OKR’s had recently been implemented. I got to see how they systematically eliminated some of the best employees in favor of those who were willing to game the system and create fake goals for themselves. As I sat in the audience, I thought to myself, “Finally I’m meeting the fabled creator of OKR’s.” Airware went out of business a few years later.
- heymijo 8y agoI would have been mad. Heck, I'm mad just reading that. It's bad management. If you are going to use metrics you have to know that they are going to create perverse incentives. It's management's job to be vigilant in seeing/hearing and looking for those perverse incentives and then determining if the trade off is acceptable.
- village-idiot 8y agoI feel like most "X technique led us down a bad path" are actually "we had shit tier management and nobody could fix it" stories in disguise.
- gowld 8y agoOKRs are how MBAs force the company to pretend their business degree is adding value. Google+ was famous for always having the bigliest OKRs while being an albatross of a product sucking the life and talent out of the company's products
- heymijo 8y agoThese are the stories I would love to hear/read about in detail.
- ma2rten 8y agoEveryone company that has more than a certain number of people (maybe 20?) needs to make plans and communicate them to it's employees. Google's OKRs are relatively lightweight way of doing that.