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

“Long before Gmail or Android or Chrome, Google brimmed with big ideas. The founders were quintessential visionaries, with extreme entrepreneurial energy. What they lacked was management experience. For Google to have real impact, or even to reach liftoff, they would have to learn to make tough choices and keep their team on track. Given their healthy appetite for risk, they’d need to pull the plug on losers—to fail fast. Not least, they would need timely, relevant data. To track their progress. To measure what mattered.”

This quote highlights the innovative spirit of Google’s founders, but the acknowledgment of their lack of management experience introduces a critical tension. Since it is now common knowledge that Google ultimately achieved tremendous success, this quote implies that management skills and data-driven decision-making were instrumental in shaping the company’s trajectory.

“But I’d also watched too many start-ups struggle with growth and scale and getting the right things done. So I’d come to a philosophy, my mantra: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”

Doerr shares an insight into the challenges of entrepreneurship, emphasizing the critical role of execution in transforming ideas into tangible success. The contrast between the perceived simplicity of generating ideas and the complexity of executing them highlights the author’s practical, results-oriented philosophy.

“But the marriage of Google and OKRs was anything but random. It was a great impedance match, a seamless gene transcription into Google’s messenger RNA.”

In this excerpt, Doerr employs metaphors to convey the integration of objectives and key results (OKRs) into Google’s culture. The metaphor of an “impedance match,” drawn from the realm of electronics, suggests a perfect alignment. With the metaphor “a seamless gene transcription into Google’s messenger RNA,” Doerr draws an analogy between the integration of OKRs and the biological process of gene transcription. Here, messenger RNA, or mRNA, is a carrier of essential information within the cellular system.