Measure what matters is a great book written by the OKR advocator John Doerr, who learned OKR while worked at Intel in the 1970s and promoted it to be widely used in Google ~2000s.
Before OKR is widely known, there are many discussion around whether vision or planning are more important or execution is more important. MBAs are favored on describing the big pictures or directions, while the doers focus on executions. The famous quote from Linus Torvalds, “Talk is cheap, show me the code”, is a good example for the mindset of the doers.
In my understanding, vision, direction, planning, and execution are all important. Execution is the 1, while vision and planning are the 0’s behind it. Without others, we can hardly make any significant achievement efficiently, and without execution, we cannot achieve anything at all.
OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is an elegant tool that combines the vision, planning, and execution.
Objectives defines the WHATs. It expresses the goals and the intents. A good objectives should be aggressive yet realistic. It must be tangible, objective, and unambiguous; and should be obvious to a rational observer whether an objective has been achieved or not. Additionally, the successfully achievement of an objective must provide clear value for the entity.
Key results defines the Hows. It expresses measurable milestones which will advance objectives in a useful manner to their constituents. A clear key result must describe the outcomes instead of activities and must include evidence of completion.
Cross-team OKRs should include all the groups who must materially participate in the OKR, and OKRs committing to each group’s contribution should appear explicitly in each such group’s OKRs.
In addition to set the process of daily operation, OKR can also help shape a healthy culture of an organization. An OKR culture is an accountable culture. You don’t push toward a goal just because the boss gave you an order. You do it because every OKR is transparently important to the company, and to the colleagues who count on you. An OKR culture can also help people from doing the (wrong) things right to doing the right things.