Good ideas with great execution are how you make magic. The book “Measure What Matters” introduces what is OKRs , why it works and how to integrate it with the process and culture.

OKRs, short for Objectives and Key Results, which is a collaborative goal-settings protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. It has been widely adopted in industry including Intel, Sun, Google and etc. Obviously it’s not a silver bullet, as we know what happened to Sun and what is happening to Intel now, but nevertheless it’s a great framework to map the ideas into concrete objectives and measurable outcomes.

What is OKR?

Objectives are WHAT is to be achieved and they should be significant, concrete, action oriented and ideally inspirational. Key results benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Most importantly they are measurable and verifiable. Either we meet the key results or not and there shouldn’t be gray areas.

Why does it work?

The book introduces four superpowers from the OKR framework. The first is Focus and Commit to priorities. OKRs forced leaders to make the hard choices to focus on the most important things needed to win. The second is Align and Connect for Teamwork. OKRs make everyone’s goals very transparent and individuals can link their objectives to the company/org’s priorities, identify the dependencies and collaborate with other teams. Top-down alignment brings meaning and motivation to work while owning their OKRs depending on people’s sense of ownership from bottom-up to boot engagement and innovations. The third is Track for Accountability.  OKSs are measurement and driven by data. The periodic check-ins, objective grading and continuous reassessment trigger actions to make sure things are on track and update timely as needed. The last is Stretch for Amazing. OKRs motivates the team to excel by doing more than we’d thought possible, the challenge helps release the creative and ambitious selves.

How to integrate it with process and culture?

CFRs (Conversation, Feedback, Recognition), a framework for continuous performance management can team up together with OKRs to lift people to a whole new level. Conversation is an authentic ,richly textured exchange between manager and contributor, aimed at driving performance. Feedback is bidirectional communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide future improvement. Recognition expresses appreciation to deserving individuals for contributions of all sizes. CRFs and OKRs, champion for transparency, accountability and empowerment to encourage people to drive the excellence outcome measurement OKRs toward the objective. This will help organizations to establish a common framework for decision making and talking about the same thing with meaning, which is an important part of culture.

After reading this one, I found this framework contains principles that’s very similar with another book “The 4 Disciplines of Execution ” including Focus on the Wildly Important, Act on the Lead Measures, Keep a Compelling Scoreboard, and Create a Cadence of Accountability. They’re all about focus, measurable, tracking and accountability leading to great execution.  

In our daily and professional life, there are lots of times we need persuade others and this book provides six good principles that we can use to influence other’s decision. As what mentioned in the book, nothing will grantee the success but combining of them together will greatly improve the chance of success.

Weapons of Influence: The first chapter introduced that some small tactics has huge impact to influence others. For example with a simple reason attached with your request, even the reason doesn’t quite makes sense, it will greatly increase the chance that others will accept your request like to cut the line. Also the comparison like show most expensive things first then less one will make people feel the price is more acceptable, similar trick might be used by real estate agent to show a pretty old low quality house first then the normal one.

Reciprocity: This principle says that when we receive something, we feel obliged to give something back. This is something embed into our genes as in history we as human need to group together to survive. It’s common to see free sample in supermarket like the Costco, which is proven a very success strategy to get more people to by the product as after people eat the free sample they feel obliged to give something back leading to more purchase. Also in negotiation the reject-then-retreat is a common trick to ask for something big (still reasonable) then fall back to the next option when got reject, as the fallback option gives the other party the impression that you’re making compromise already so they need do something. At the same time to avoid been manipulated by this, it’s useful to think about other’s true intention.

Consistency: This principle shows that we feel compelled to be consistent with what we have said/done in the past. A common tactic is to get someone to say YES to some small thing first to make commitment, then ask something more bigger. Interesting that the author used example from prisoner-of-war camps by China after the Korean war to successfully get corporations from the captives.

Social Proof:” When we’re uncertain how to behavior or react, we look to others for answers. We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it. This is why we’re seeing so many “best-selling products” in Ads, and also “national bestseller” on lots of books’ cover including this book. Also it can be used to explain why the suicide contagion and jonestown massacre.

Liking: This tells us that we’re more likely to agree to someone’s request if we know and like him/her. Friendships and personal relationships can have strong influence in our choice. There are a few things including physical attractiveness, similarity, compliments, contact and cooperation will create the liking effect that more easily to get other’s buy-in. This is actually also very helpful during recruiting to convince others to join team, by sharing the common things for similarity, find PoC with similar background with candidate and etc. 

Authority: We tend to obey figures of authority (people with titles or expertise), this is what most of people taught since kids. That’s why in so many Ads we are seeing something pretend to be doctor/teacher will have bigger influence to people’s purchase decision. Also celebrity endorsements in advertising is useful overall.

Scarcity: We perceive something to be more valuable when it’s less available. Hunger marketing is a typical example here, usually offering products with barging pricing while stock is limited with limited time offer, deadline and etc. The trigger is that the fear of loss is always greater than the desire for gain, we weigh more on worry that we lost the scared items.

All these actually remind another book thinking fast and slow. It’s in our genes that we need make fast decisions with mental shortcuts, which likely to very critical as our ancestor had to make quick decisions in dangerous situations to survive. These short cuts works well in most cases but become possible vulnerabilities in our decision making which comes out the six principles of influences here.