Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the cofounders of Google. Doerr opens the book with a description of the two men as young founders. He depicts them as ambitious and visionary individuals, two complementary partners whose demeanors and skillsets balanced each other: “While Sergey crafted the commerce of technology, Larry toiled on the product and imagined the impossible” (4). Though he depicts both Page and Brin as intelligent, Doerr describes Page as quieter and more deliberate: “an engineer’s engineer […] a soft-spoken nonconformist” (4). Doerr also claims Page was more grounded: “He was a blue-sky thinker with his feet on the ground” (4). Brin, in contrast, Doerr describes as more high-energy and impulsive: “exuberant, mercurial, strongly opinionated […] restless, always pushing for more; he might drop to the floor in the middle of a meeting for a set of push-ups” (4). Although the founders’ dreams were lofty, Doerr notes, “There was no braggadocio to Larry [Page], only calm, considered judgment” (5).

Both men, though, Doerr depicts as youthful and even slightly childish in addition to driven and knowledgeable. The PowerPoint deck that the two men used while pitching Doerr “had just seventeen slides—and only two with numbers. (They added three cartoons just to flesh out the deck.)” (4). This approach shows a slight naivety, as well as a sense of playfulness. At the same time, Doerr notes that both Page and Brin had a deep understanding of technology and its potential. Overall, Doerr portrays the Google founders as intelligent, ambitious visionaries who simply needed a metrics-based system—such as OKRs—to bring their visions to fruition.

Throughout the book, Doerr uses Google as a prime example of a company that has successfully utilized OKRs to drive its growth and success. Doerr claims that “perhaps no organization, not even Intel, has scaled OKRs more effectively than Google” (13). As such, he touches on the company multiple times throughout the text to illustrate different facets and benefits of the OKR system.

One of the aspects of Google’s culture that Doerr says aligns perfectly with the OKR system is the company’s penchant for stretch goals. Stretch goals, according to Doerr, are ambitious and aspirational objectives that push individuals and teams to strive for exceptional performance. Stretch goals are not goals that teams expect to meet in full; in fact, failure is expected. However, the process of setting and working toward these stretch goals encourages innovation, learning, and growth. Doerr describes Google as a company that is highly ambitious, well resourced, and tolerant of failure when it comes to the pursuit of stretch goals: “In the world of objectives and key results, the company is synonymous with exponentially aggressive goals, or what author Steven Levy calls ‘the gospel of 10x’” (138). Google aims for astounding improvement or achievement rather than incremental progress. Doerr assigns numbers to Google’s stretch goals approach, emphasizing that Google has a healthy relationship with failure:

At Google, in line with Andy Grove’s old standard, aspirational OKRs are set at 60 to 70 percent attainment. In other words, performance is expected to fall short at least 30 percent of the time. And that’s considered success! (139).

Doerr shows that this culture of setting stretch goals and embracing failure meshes perfectly with the OKR system’s focus on ambitious objectives and measurable outcomes. He claims that goals such as these have led to products like Gmail, which revolutionized the email industry and became wildly successful.

Aside from Google’s ambition, Doerr believes that the company’s culture of transparency fosters a perfect environment for OKRs, emphasizing The Importance of Transparency in Organizations. OKRs are inherently transparent because they are meant to be shared and communicated throughout the organization. Google has a culture of openness and sharing, which allows for clear alignment and visibility of objectives across teams.

Andy Grove, a former executive at Intel, was highly influential in shaping Doerr’s views on goal setting and performance management. Doerr worked under Grove at Intel in the 1970s and credits Grove with developing the concept of OKRs, which became the cornerstone of Measure What Matters.

Doerr’s admiration for Grove is evident throughout the book, as he consistently references Grove’s leadership and expertise. Doerr describes his mentor as “the greatest manager of his or any era” who “ran the best-run company I had ever seen” (6). This glowing description not only establishes Grove’s authority in the field of management but also highlights his impact on Doerr’s own professional development. By extension, it also confers credibility on the OKR methodology that Doerr promotes in his book.

Doerr describes Grove as the embodiment of the OKR system: “Andy was a problem solver at heart. As one Intel historian observed, he ‘seemed to know exactly what he wanted and how he was going to achieve it.’ He was sort of a walking OKR” (30). This description portrays Grove as a visionary leader who had a clear sense of direction and a strategic approach to achieving his goals.

While Doerr often describes Grove in admiring terms, he also acknowledges some of Grove’s flaws: Grove had a “hot temper” and “was hard on everybody, most of all himself. A proudly self-made man, he could be arrogant. He did not suffer fools, or meandering meetings, or ill-formed proposals” (30). Doerr expands on this description of Grove’s intense personality with a specific sensory detail: “He kept a set of rubber stamps on his desk, including one engraved BULLSHIT” (30). This image showcases Grove’s no-nonsense attitude and his insistence on efficiency and precision in business.

At the same time, Doerr shows that Grove’s demeanor was balanced by his commitment to openness, transparency, and communication:

Despite Andy’s hot temper, he was down-to-earth and approachable, open to any good idea […] Every big decision, he believed, should begin with a ‘free discussion stage […] an inherently egalitarian process.’ The way to get his respect was to disagree and stand your ground and, ideally, be shown to be right in the end (31).

This observation shows that Grove was a complex leader who valued diverse perspectives and fostered a culture of debate and intellectual rigor.

Doerr sums up Grove’s impact on the fields of technology and management by noting that he was named Time’s Man of the Year in 1997; Grove was deemed “the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and the innovative potential of microchips” (32). Doerr characterizes Grove as “a rare hybrid, a supreme technologist and the greatest chief executive of his day” (32). Overall, Andy Grove, as described by John Doerr in Measure What Matters, was a visionary leader who was a living example of the power of the OKR system.