13. The evolution of OKRs

Transcript

OKRs can be traced back to the 1950s with Peter Drucker’s book, “The Practice of Management”. Drucker proposed the concept of management by objective. A more human-centered approach to management, which seeks to align the entire organization with defined goals.

Andy Grove, who was the CEO at Intel in the early 1980s, adopted and refined the “management by objective” approach by adding the additional component of “key results”, and essentially, this is where the focus was on metrics to measure to what extent the objective had been achieved?

A really interesting book to look at is Andy Grove’s book “High Output Management”. And in this we see Grove applying manufacturing principles to organizational design. He tells a very convincing story about how he delivered Intel’s ultimate game-changer.

As we move into the early 2000s, we then come across John Doerr, who worked at Intel with Andy Grove. Doerr, took the OKR concept, which was developed at Intel, and perfected it while working with Google. He introduced OKRs to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

At the initial point, when OKRs were adopted into Google, they had only 40 employees. They have well over 100,000 employees and are still using OKRs today. In the last decade, we have seen some of the most successful organizations on the planet adopt OKRs as a “north star” to revolutionize their goal alignment and strategy execution.