Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York stock exchange, at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution for global growth for more than 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE, and at ICE's 12 exchanges and seven clearing houses around the world. Now here's your host, Josh King, head of communications at Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
We were honored to have Mr. Doerr ring the opening bell of the New York stock exchange to celebrate the publication of his first book, Measure What Matters: how Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. Our conversation with John Doerr, right after this.
Speaker 1:
Inside the ICE House is presented this week by ICE Global Index System, or GIS. ICE's index families combine leading reference data, evaluated pricing and analytics, along with a track record in index provisioning, spending 50 years to deliver unique cross asset and best in class index solutions.
Josh King:
Any entrepreneur with a dream can watch at NYSE.com the moment that John Doerr rang our opening bell this morning, and imagine a world where their idea catches hold, their supply chain works, their distribution network brings the product to market, the business achieves scale, revenues start to flow in, and the prospect of going public becomes very real indeed. You too can be up on that podium, ringing the bell. Until then, you better see if you can get a meeting with John Doerr or his partners at Kleiner Perkins. If they like your idea, they may give you some early stage money to see if you can make it from the garage to the abandoned warehouse, and eventually an office on Sandhill Road.
Josh King:
But if they love your idea, as most Kleiner Perkins investments are a manifestation of love of one sort or another, Doerr will give you something even more durable, even more valuable, a personal visit, and a deep dive into the world of OKRs and CFRs, the building blocks of a sustainable and scalable corporate culture. A lifetime of work went into perfecting this process, and it's chronicled in John Doerr's love letter to the future, which, if you want that meeting with Kleiner Perkins, you better head over to Amazon and buy right now, Measure What Matters: how Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. Fresh from his bell ringing, John Doerr joins us in the ICE House. Welcome, sir. It's an honor.
John Doerr:
It's an honor to be here. Thank you.
Josh King:
How did it feel up on that podium?
John Doerr:
It was a great thrill. I was there with my business partners and most importantly, my daughter.
Josh King:
Let's just wind back the clock a couple weeks to Spotify's direct floor listing, because Kleiner Perkins had a direct role in that. How do you think that all worked for Daniel Eck, Barry McCarthy, and the team at Spotify?
John Doerr:
I know Daniel and Barry are very happy with the outcome. They've held a vision that they could transform people's access to entertainment, even one day information, and Spotify has shown it's done exactly that.
Josh King:
Tell me about the pride that you feel. I mean, I'm looking at a list, John, of all of the exits you've had, so many companies that become part of our daily rhythm of life. When you feel like you've taken an idea from the very start from that first meeting when they come into your office, to the time when they're up on that podium, ringing the bell and seeing their shares floated into the public.
John Doerr:
Well, what's most exciting about these entrepreneurs, whether it's Jeff Bezos at Amazon or Larry and Sergey at Google is, I think the number of jobs that they've created and these new ventures in recent years have created over a million high paying, wonderful jobs, over half of them in America, and the rest all around the world. My partner Bing Gordon likes to refer to these companies as internet treasures. Can you imagine life without Amazon or without Google and access to all the world's information? I can't. And so I'm very grateful for what those entrepreneurs, their vision, their boldness, their imagination, for what the world might and ought to be.
Josh King:
This is a very long list John, it goes on for 30 some odd pages. Many of them end up in IPOs. Another number of them end up in merger or acquisition. A few of them end up in liquidation or bankruptcy. What are the lessons that you take on that very small number of ones that you can't rank among those that have changed the world or created jobs in perpetuity, like you just spoke of?
John Doerr:
Well, I think the most important lesson is embodied in the book, Measure What Matters. And that is that the difference between success and failure is often setting the right goals and then getting your team aligned around those goals and then tracking your progress, and creating a culture where it's okay to fail. You want stretch to do really outrageous things. As Larry Page says, if you're aiming for Mars and you only get to the moon, well, that's a pretty good outcome.
Josh King:
Speaking of Larry Page, I'm going to play one YouTube that may be one of the most inane YouTube posts ever posted. But in fact, it was the first and it has 48 million views. And it was posted on this date in 2005 by Jawed Kareem. Let's listen.
Jawed Kareem:
All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say.
Josh King:
Susan Wojcicki had basically rented her garage to Larry and Sergey as the first home of Google. And then she, as head of YouTube, was given basically a stretch OKR.
John Doerr:
The book tells the story of YouTube growing from an unprofitable, and what shall I say, from an unprofitable and embryonic service, into achieving a really audacious goal, which is not revenues, not ads, but to get a billion hours of watch time against a fundamentally democratic and curated video experience. A billion hours sounds enormous, but the way they put it in context is it's about 20% of the world's television viewing time, so.
Josh King:
Let's now break down exactly what Susan Wojcicki, Larry Brin, Sergey Page were facing when John Doerr walks into their office and they said "We've invested in you. Now I would like you to think about managing your business through a process of OKR, objective and key results." For our listeners who probably go through life with an annual review or a few goals that are put in a long piece of paper, why is this a simpler way of going through growth and scalable?
John Doerr:
Well, let me tell you a couple of stories. The first is when I originally met Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and they were Stanford computer science dropouts, and they were running Google out of their dorm room. And the university was throwing them off campus because they'd taken the Stanford network down to its knees. They'd invented a better way to get more relevant search. And they were, I think the 18th search engine. So they weren't first to the market, but the value of what they were doing and the growth was really clear. Larry sat right across the table from me, as you are now. And I asked him how big this was going to be. And he said "Hmm, 10 billion." And I about fell out of my chair because at the time, a great company then like Microsoft might have a billion in its market value.
John Doerr:
I said "Surely you mean market cap?" And he said "No, I mean revenues, John. You have no idea," this is in 1999, "how crummy search is and how much better we can make it in order to achieve our goal, get all the world's information available to everyone." I took him at face value. He was bold. I didn't argue with him. I believed in his vision. I bet on it. And shortly after I invested, I had a meeting with the entire Google team, maybe two dozen people. We gathered around the ping pong table, which was the boardroom table, and the bean bag chairs. And I went through my 30 slide pitch, borrowed straight from Andy Grove on how to set objectives, how to create a culture where it's okay to take risks, how to measure your progress, how to course correct this system called Okay Ours.
John Doerr:
At the end of it, I asked Sergey and Larry if they'd use it. And Sergey was enthusiastic, he said that he'd embrace it. Well, actually, that's not quite true. What he really said was, "We don't have any other way to manage this company, so I guess we'll give it a try." And so I took that as kind of an endorsement. And from that day going forward, every Googler, every quarter, writes down her objectives and key results. They grade them, they publish them, they share them with the whole organization. And then, you know what? At the end of each quarter, they set them aside. They're not used for bonuses. They're not used for promotions. They're used, as you say, to get collective commitment around goals that really matter. And then they repeat the cycle quarter after quarter.
Josh King:
It's 1999, Larry and Sergey are in your office, you must be taking hundreds of meetings with people like Larry and Sergey. What separated them from the other five meetings you had that week?
John Doerr:
Their resolve. Not just the idea, but their commitment to execute. I like to say ideas, relatively speaking, are easy. It's execution that's everything. And that Google team delivered.
Josh King:
Execution is everything. Let's go back well before 1999, I'm thinking 1974, 1975. Let's play a video of one of your mentors. And I have some questions on the other side.
Andy Grove:
Typically get together people who have never worked together and give them a very difficult job to do, all these outward advance seminars, stuff like that, where you build house of cards with strangers to balance yourself, balance beams and rely on strangers. It's a pretty good illustration of what it is like to put together a group of people that, many of whom have never worked together. If they knew each other, they only knew each other casually. And give them a job that better be a hard job, because if it wasn't a hard job, you can't really make it in to a differential competitive advantage.
Josh King:
So that's Andy Grove. Tell me about your relationship with him. It started, you were trying to just get an old girlfriend back.
John Doerr:
Yeah. I found myself in Silicon Valley with no job, no place to live. And looking for my ex-girlfriend, who had dumped me and was in hiding. So I thought I'd apprentice myself to a venture capital firm, because like my dad, I wanted to start a company and I heard venture capital had something to do with that. No surprise, they all turned me down. But one of them said "We've just backed this new chip company in Santa Clara called Intel. You might look at that."
John Doerr:
So I cold called my way into the highest ranking executive I could find there. His name was Bill David. And by the end of the day, I had a summer job. And by the end of the first day working there, I found out that my former girlfriend was working down the hall from me. She was not amused when I showed up there. But by the end of the summer, we were back together again, which is a sweet part of the story. That was just when Intel was inventing the eight bit microprocessor, which was the basis for the IBM personal computer for Microsoft, for MS doss. And so it was a very exciting time in Silicon Valley, in innovation, in technology.
Josh King:
What was it about this Hungarian emigre, and you put his Hungarian name in the book, but I couldn't pronounce it, but everyone for decades later would know him as Andy Grove. What about his style in that building in Santa Clara at Intel, gave birth to OKR and built Intel into what it is?
John Doerr:
Well, he came to America a refugee from the Nazis in Hungary, with nothing other than his brains. And went to college here in New York, where we're having our conversation, and then was the operations director at Fairchild Semiconductor. And he didn't much like the Fairchild culture. He grabbed me at one point and he said "John, it doesn't matter so much what you know, it's execution that matters the most." And so Andy created a goals system to achieve operating excellence, execution at Intel, called objectives and key results. Simply put, the objective is what you want to have accomplished, and the key results are how you're going to get there. What and how. And in the semiconductor industry, thousands of people have to get lines a millionth of a meter wide exactly right, or nothing works at all.
John Doerr:
So there's a real premium on rigor, on honesty, and on results. And so Andy, as a human being, was ruthlessly intellectually honest. Everyone knew that Andy was in charge. He was an introvert. He was fair. He was visionary. He was tough. He was also an educator. He thought the role of a leader was to educate, empower the team. And so I loved working at Intel. I miss him dearly. And the way I've tried to pay this forward is to take his goal system, and by now I've shared it with maybe a hundred different organizations. They don't all adopt it, but anyone who faithfully follows this system finds that it works and transforms their team.
Josh King:
And the key results, you describe a scene in the book, when you're working on a IBM electric typewriter, you've got to come up with those key words for the objective, and those measurable results for the results that leave no space for ambiguity. And in the book, you have sort of lousy OKRs and very effective and key OKRs. What are the differences?
John Doerr:
Well, look, you want to have the best part possible objectives and the best possible key results. And good objectives, remember, that's what you want to have accomplished, are significant, concrete, action-oriented, and inspiring. Good key results are at once, they're specific and time bound, they're a aggressive but realistic, and above all else they're measurable and verifiable. So that's what makes for great objectives and great key results. One of the most simple and powerful things about this system is you publish these. These are transparently available to everyone in an organization. And in many, I dare say, most companies in the US and around the world, that in itself is a really radical idea. The goals are confidential or secret. They're put in the drawer. No one looks at them until the end of the year, that doesn't do any good.
Josh King:
You have them up on the wall in your office. And there's one of the companies you mentioned in your book, put them above the urinal in the men's room, just so everyone could see them at a key point.
John Doerr:
Yep. I was sold as an investor when I took a break in the bathroom and found their objectives and key results right there.
Josh King:
As you're looking at companies reporting their OKRs to you or giving you a snapshot of where their companies are, like many companies, they will revert to the usual stoplight, green, yellow, and red about issues that are going on at the company. And if you have investors like Kleiner Perkins walking in the room, you probably want to put up as many of those green lights as possible. But you're a guy who likes to see a lot of red lights, right?
John Doerr:
Yep. This is a very important point. All of us believe goals are important, but many of us are setting goals the wrong way. And most of us are not setting goals at all. What do I mean by wrong? People believe that you're supposed to achieve all your goals. Well, that's not right. You can choose to create a culture where it's okay to stretch, to take a risk and fail, and get better results. So it's up to each company, but my advice is set your threshold at about 70%. If you get all greens and everything's done at the end of the quarter, well, maybe you weren't stretching quite far enough. On the other hand, if you're not achieving hardly any of your goals, say 20 or 30%, then that's a different kind of problem.
John Doerr:
One of the executives that I work with does something I think is really smart, which is every month he gets the whole team together and they look at their goals and they try to sell each others on their reds, their goals that are the most at risk that are the most important. They take a vote then, across 20 goals that they identify the three or four that are the highest priority. And then everyone on the team pulls together to go tackle those problem for the organization. It encourages collaboration, intellectual honesty, and produces really spectacular outcomes.
Josh King:
And when you get into these meetings, one of the first things you do is basically dismiss all the greens, they're fine. You got to focus in on the reds and maybe some of the yellows.
John Doerr:
Exactly. And OKRs, by the way, are not everything that's going on in a company. They're not the combined work order. What they are, are the goals that really deserve special attention.
Josh King:
You use a very interesting analogy to sports in Measure What Matters. I want to play a little clip of one of the most success, full coaches in NFL history, Bill Belichick, and on the other side, talk about the Sandhill Unicorn.
Speaker 6:
If you had to describe the tenants or the principles of your leadership style or approach, what would they be?
Bill Belichick:
Do your job, be attentive, pay attention to details and put the team first. In football, to be successful as an individual player, you need your teammates. And the better you connect with them, the better you interact as a team, the more successful you'll be individually. And I'd say we try to do things to help the team building process.
Josh King:
In Measure What Matters, John Doerr, you talk about this football team, which I don't think actually has uniforms, called the Sandhilled Unicorns. And you paint this picture of the fact that a coach like Belichick with five super bowls under his belt. His OKR is basically win super bowls because Mr. Craft wants to increase the value of his team. But on the other side of the house in the front office, there's a whole other set of OKRs that need to help Mr. Craft make money and build the value of the New England Patriots. So, as you're describing the totality of the Sandhill Unicorns to one of your companies that you're investing in, how do they make sense of this football team that you're sketching out on the table?
John Doerr:
They love the football team story as a way to understand how a whole organization gets its goals aligned. And there's really two extremes here. One is, everybody's uncoordinated, they don't really get the big picture, and they're just writing down their tasks. That doesn't get us where we're going. The other extreme is what's called cascading objectives and key results. And that's where everyone lockstep, inherits the goals of the person above them. And if you can imagine an organization like Google with 70,000 employees, it could take forever to get people aligned lockstep. So the happy middle ground is for the leadership to declare, "These are the important what's, the objectives for the whole organization." And then in parallel, people create their individual or their team OKRs. Get them aligned, get them published. And this process is not easy. It'll take a year or more to build what I call a great goal muscle, but it's very rewarding. And at the end of a year or so of doing it, they're even fun to do.
Josh King:
Bringing together these two sides of the house. In the football analogy, it's the 60 players in the field and everyone else in the front office. How does that compare to Google? What are the different synthetic parts of the organization that need to come together to make the whole?
John Doerr:
That's a good example. One might be the engineering technical organization, which is trying to make search the best, most delightful expert experience in the world. But then someone needs to take those search results out to advertisers, for example, who want to buy keywords that are especially relevant to their offering to the marketplace. So classically you have a development organization and then a business development or sales organization, and those come together creating a valuable service and business.
Josh King:
And in Measure What Matters, John, you talk about one particular stretch that Google faced, which was, let's create a browser all on our own ,Google Chrome. Bring us back to that moment and how the OKRs has helped make Chrome one of the leading search engines.
John Doerr:
That's a great story. And it goes back to 2008. Do you remember the internet in 2008, before Chrome? It was slow. And so Larry and Sergey set an objective, which was to make the experience on the web as compelling as flipping through a magazine: high quality images, very fast, very fluid. And they were not the first browser in the marketplace. They came to the game late. And so they knew they had to be at least 10 times faster. And they had to start with nothing to get tens of millions of users. So a product manager then, by the name of Sundar Pichai, who today is Google's CEO, he's the CEO of Google, set out the objective to build the next generation of web applications platform, or in other words, build the best browser.
John Doerr:
And he set that his most important objective, and it's very important to pick these the right way, would be numbers of users, not downloads, not clickthroughs not add revenues, but number of users. Why? Well, because numbers of users would clearly show whether or not Chrome was the best. I think his first year, his goal was 20 million and he blew it. He only got 10, but he kept the same objective. And the next year, which was 2009, upped the goal to 50 million users. This time he got 37 and a half, 70%, which is kind of an acceptable grade in Google land, but he was not yet satisfied. So for 2010, he raised the goal again to a hundred million users. And this time through a combination of better technology, broadened distribution, and an ad campaign, kaboom! He got to 111 million users on the Chrome browser. Today, there's over a billion people using Chrome every day. And so I love that story, not so much for its happy ending, but for the nerd in me, it shows the power of tenacity, keeping the same objective, but increasing the key results year after year.
Josh King:
When we come back with John Doerr, more on the very special OKR and CFR stories in Measure What Matters, how they are truly changing the world.
Speaker 1:
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Josh King:
Back now with John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, the author of his first book Measure What Matters: how Google, Bono, and the Fates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. John just rang the opening bell of the New York stock exchange to celebrate the publication of his book. The book is divided really into two parts. The second part is about focusing a little bit more on a company's culture and executing, and also brings into the discussion, CFRs, conversations, feedback, and recognition. How do OKRs play with CFRs?
John Doerr:
So here's a good way to think about it. In football, the objectives are the goal line and the key results are the 10 yard markers all along the way, but that's not the entire game. Once you get good objectives and key results laid out, then you've got to have the huddles and you've got to call the plays and substitute the players in real time as we march towards the goal. And so Andy Grove himself said "It's not just OKRs. I want people to have regular weekly one-on-one meetings with their team to give feedback in the moment." And more and more businesses are saying "This idea of an annual review that comes 12 months after the work has been done, it's expensive. It's demotivating, we're just going to ditch that in favor of a more fluid, ongoing, realtime conversation or feedback or recognition or all three of those." So they're sort of the twin of OKRs, are CFRs.
Josh King:
I think you can do so many things five days a week, even seven days a week on recognition, and this sort of challenge for organizations to get their internal communications networks better, to be able to say either in a real way, let's gather around someone's office, let's pat them on the back for a major accomplishment they had this week that may be outside of their normal purview, or to do it electronically through making sure that the rest of the organization knows that the CEO saw what happened here even if it's multiple steps down the ladder and wanted to recognize that. When you're coaching and talking to some of your CEOs, how are you telling them to do better at recognition?
John Doerr:
So I encourage them to be systematic about it and to use it, you hinted at this, really modern tools to get you there. There are mobile Cloud-based, both goal setting and recognition systems, that use cues, social cues, nudges, if you will, and cheers for progress. And so you don't just want the recognition to come from the CEO or the leadership, you'd like the organization to celebrate its successes. The leader in this field is, I'll confess, a company I've invested in by the name of Better Works. And so from JP Morgan to Intuit company, these kinds of tools are especially relevant for millennials. What do we know about millennial workers? Well, they want constant feedback. They want to know how their work figures into the big picture and they don't want to be micromanaged. So these kinds of online social tools are really perfect to engage them, develop them, and to retain them in your organization.
Josh King:
We've been talking about companies like Google and YouTube, in the first part of our conversation. I listened to a conversation you had about three years ago, and the interviewer asked you "John, we haven't really had any spectacular exits in the healthcare space." And you write in Measure What Matters, one example of Nuna, this story of Jini Kim and the very personal journey that she had with her brother, Kimong, developing a new approach in healthcare space. How's that going and how did they use OKRs and CFRs?
John Doerr:
Well, I'm glad you asked. Jini is a remarkable entrepreneur who I work with and she runs Nuna, which is a healthcare data startup. Now Nuna began, actually in 2010, using data to who improve the healthcare of workers at really very large companies. About two years into the company's life, she learned that the US government had issued a request to build the first ever Cloud database for Medicaid. And you'll remember that Medicaid is that program that serves 70 million Americans who are poor, young, or have disabilities. At the time, Jini's team was tiny. It was just 15 people. This database had to be built in one year and Nuna had lots of existing commitments, and frankly, they were not going to make a lot of money on the project. So this was a bet your company moment, and Jini did not flinch. She jumped at the opportunity and here's the reason why.
John Doerr:
Her younger brother Kimong has autism. What's worse is when he was seven, he had his first grand mal seizure at Disneyland. He fell to the ground. He stopped breathing. Her parents are Korean immigrants, and they came to the country with few resources and very limited English. So it was up to Jini to enroll the family in Medicaid, and she was just nine years old at the time. And that moment then defined her life's mission and the company's mission, which is to get affordable high quality healthcare for everyone. And so Nuna bid on this project, they won it, and they completed it on time and on budget in less than 12 months, building the first ever database that then allows policy makers, physicians, patients, to see the results of the care. And as we know with the New York stock exchange, when you have markets, when information is freely available, you always get better outcomes. So I think the company is today regarded as the leader in providing that kind of data to the healthcare system. And they're off to the races.
Josh King:
At the very other side of the spectrum, John Doerr, there is the birth moment of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. From funding of zero to funding of 20 billion, basically overnight, puts a CEO like Patty Stonesifer in the hot seat. Gates is still chairman and CEO of Microsoft, he's a busy man, he's got a lot of things to do. Time is going to be short with Bill and Melinda. How does Patty deal with the fact that from the get go, she has to start giving away a billion dollars a year using OKRs, CFRs?
John Doerr:
Well Bill, he's like Andy Grove, ruthlessly, intellectually honest, he's constantly learning, and he's very data driven. And so for him, the challenge of running Microsoft and at the same time being the chairman of the Gates Foundation, could have been overwhelming. But Patty and he used objectives and key results to get very, very clear on how to measure successor programs. A lot of nonprofits have problems with that. They initially selected a measure, which I think was age adjusted life years extended. And that caused programs before they got to a decision from Bill, to get she sharply focused on what really matters, as we say in the book Measure What Matters. And so to this day, I think the Gates Foundation is regarded as one of the best, most effective change engines in our world. And it's one of those treasures that I can't imagine the world getting by without.
Josh King:
Another well known person comes to Silicon Valley, comes to the door of Kleiner Perkins, knocks on John Doerr's door for advice, its Bono. At some point he is getting inspired, I think, through the original work of Bob Geldoff to feed the world. That's a big goal, lofty in itself. You can't imagine... what's the acronym used in the book, BH...
John Doerr:
A BHAG, a big, hairy ass goal.
Josh King:
Right! And there's not one bigger than that. I want to hear a little bit of Bono talking about when he first came up with this idea, and then have you talk about how you've helped him.
Bono:
It's a journey that started 20 years ago. You may remember that song We are the World, or Do they know it's Christmas?Band Aid, Live Aid. Another very tall, grizzled rockstar, my friends, Sir Bob Geldoff, issued a challenge, feed the world. It was a great moment and it utterly changed my life.
Josh King:
And from that point on, how has Bono sort of become much more focused on what he's doing in his work?
John Doerr:
One of the world's greatest rock stars would be an unlikely user of objectives and key results, but Bono had, and has, Bono has a mission to alleviate global poverty. And so he set out to do that with two really gorgeous objectives, audacious objectives, and one was debt relief for the world's poorest countries. And the second was universal access to anti-HIV drugs. And with those objectives in place, he was able to focus and measure the progress of the one organization, quarter after quarter, year after year, in waging this global war against poverty and disease. He's a poet, he's an activist, and a fact-ivist, because he wants his work to always be driven by the data. He sets ambitious goals, stretch goals. He's a perfect user of OKRs. And I'm just thrilled that Andy Grove's invention is helping fight AIDS in Africa.
Josh King:
Does he come to you for feedback?
John Doerr:
He does. I serve on the board of one, and at every board meeting, we review the organization's objectives and key results, not in a controlling way, but as a flexible way to get a sense of where the leadership of the organization is going. Look, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They will not substitute for either a strong culture or stronger management, but when you get these goals and objectives lined up the right way, and those fundamentals in place, they can take you to the mountain top. I've seen it time after time.
Josh King:
One of your examples using CFRs and culture is through Zoom pizza. Tell me that story.
John Doerr:
So there's a famous saying about culture that no one can find the originator of, and it goes as follows: culture eats strategy for breakfast. I love it because culture is the way you share values simply, throughout an organization, so you can streamline decisions, get the right decisions made faster. So I like to think of OKRs as transparent vessels for the what's and how's, the objectives and key results, into which we pour our values, which is why we do this work that matters so much. The Zoom pizza story, it really shows all the elements of OKRs, but I chose to emphasize culture because at the very beginning, the co-founders, Alex and Julia, concluded that they wanted to do more than make better pizza. They wanted to make sure that high quality food would be economically available to everyone everywhere. And so they described in some detail how setting these kinds of goals in a transparent way, all motivated by inspiring mission, would let them get there and they're making good progress.
Josh King:
What was your process for writing this book? It feels as I read it, like you have your philosophy that was handed down to you by Andy Grove, that was reinforced by mentors and friends like Bill Campbell, that played out in the boardrooms of places like Google. And then you have these wonderful stories of companies that most people never heard of, and they are writing in their first person experience. Was this a process, whether it was two years ago, or whenever you said, I want to write Measure What Matters?
John Doerr:
So I started two years ago, and really what inspired the book was a slide set, 30 slides, because I'd given this OKR talk, and Andy Grove version of it, or of my version of the Andy Grove talk, maybe a hundred times over several decades. But I was always frustrated. I felt I'd only scratched the surface and figured if I tried to write a book that it would do the subject justice. I then knew that the stories of entrepreneurs would be much more interesting than me trying to teach people about this. So I had a bunch of conversations and chose the best of those, I think, to share with readers and more than just readers, people who want to take on this cause, who want to improve their own teams.
John Doerr:
I think of smart goal setting as a kind of movement. And I really challenge in the book people to do this, not only for their teams, but for themselves: do you have the right metrics in your life? Are you measuring really matters? Because if you're not, you ought to do that. You ought to write down today, your objectives and your key results, your values. And if you'd like some feedback on those, you could email them to me, I'm [email protected].
John Doerr:
Because I think we can take OKRs beyond our businesses or beyond our non-profit organizations. We can take them to our families, to our schools, even to our government. Imagine if the local city council was agreeing and transparent about what they want to accomplish in their community. Jim Collins writes about the book that "Anybody who cares about performance in any sector of our society should embrace this school system." It's not a one size fits all. You can adapt this. In fact, every successful organization does. The way Google uses these, which I describe in detail, is different than the way Intuit uses them, is different than the Gates Foundation. But if you take this kind of a framework and you have the leadership really embrace it, you can, in fact, you must measure what really matters.
Josh King:
I want to end our conversation, John, with where you dedicate the book, sort of a longer dedication than most people will typically write in a book, it's to Bill Campbell. You mentioned Intuit earlier, but Bill was instrumental in leading Intuit. He sat on the board of Apple with helping Steve Jobs for many, many years. And he had a profound effect on you and so many other people in Silicon Valley. Hear a little bit from Bill and have you finish with your thoughts on the legacy that he leaves behind.
Bill Campbell:
The other thing that a multiplier has to do is coach them to know that they should be paying attention to everything that's going on. You could be a marketing person talking about a sales activity. You could be a technology person talking about our operation. Everybody around there has something to offer. I don't want people sitting in silos. I want them to kind of learn what everybody else is thinking so that collectively, we're going to have the best ideas as well. But that's what you do. Multiplying is making sure that, one plus one equal three, and that's what we do.
Josh King:
Multiplying may be what measure what matters does.
John Doerr:
That's well said. Bill Campbell passed away within months of Andy Grove, and the book is dedicated to the two of them. Two really inspiring leaders. Most of the book is Andy Grove's ideas, which is why I have a whole chapter dedicating the work, the mission to Coach Campbell. He was referred to as the Coach. And he came Columbia University. He was a scrawny little quarterback with a not so distinguished football record, but loved the university, became chairman of the board of Columbia, came out to Silicon Valley, helped Steve Jobs launch the Macintosh, witnessed Steve being thrown out of Apple. When Steve returned, Steve asked Bill to join his board. And he's the most amazing executive that I ever recruited in my career. So we worked together on lots of different companies.
John Doerr:
I think what matters to our listeners, is that Bill brought a signature quality to his work that people are often uncomfortable with in business. And that is love. Kind of tough love. When Bill was in the room coaching you, he wasn't just coaching you, he was also coaching your team. Everyone's eyes would light up when he was in the room because he was colorful, he was profane, but you knew that he had your back, that he was there to make you and your team better every day. And he didn't have just one game plan that he ran. It was a customized personal assessment of your strengths and weaknesses and how you could do better. Steve Jobs said "Bill's my most important confidant." I miss him. And so do thousands of others who got the benefit of his insights. And so the book's dedicated to him.
Josh King:
It was a room full of love when he walked in with that case of Bud Light under his arm.
John Doerr:
Yeah, it was. That lubricant really made his coaching sessions all the more memorable.
Josh King:
I've listened to this podcast with John Doerr, I want to learn more about Measure What Matters, what do I find when I visit the website whatmatters.com?
John Doerr:
Well, a number of things that I hope are useful. And my aim is this be a useful book for anyone who cares about quality and excellence. There's a short conversation with me. There's a summary of what's going on in the book. There's also importantly more stories. The story of how, for example, Anne Wojcicki, Susan's sister, is using OKRs at 23 and Me is in there. And there's a way for you to get involved, to become part of this movement. I'd really like to spread this word as far and as wide as we can. And there's no better place to start than with this book, Measure What Matters.
Josh King:
It's his love letter to the future, Measure What Matters: how Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. We've been honored to be joined in the library of the ICE house, the New York stock exchange with John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. Thank you so much for joining us.
John Doerr:
Thank you.
Speaker 1:
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