What are good OKR books?

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We reccomend these printed OKR books.

Measure What Matters by John Doerr

Radical Focus by Christine Wodtke

Start Less, Finish More: Building Strategic Agility with Objectives and Key Results by Dan Montgomery

Objectives and Key Results: Driving Focus, AlignmDaent, and Engagement with OKRs by Ben Lamorte, Paul Niven

Start Less, Finish More: Building Strategic Agility with Objectives and Key Results by Dan Montgomery

All these OKR books are good, although different. John Doerr’s one is a good intro from the grandfather of OKRs. Radical Focus is a nice quick read in the form of a fable. Lamorte’s book is the most in-depth and theoretical.

Free OKR books

As a free OKR e-book we suggest you to read:

Step by Step Guide to OKRs by Weekdone – This one’s a nice free e-book you can download. It’s a practical guide to goal setting that offers concrete examples to help you start setting impactful and meaningful goals. This book teaches you how to manage a team better and create a feeling of success.

This one is a “How-to” guide to OKRs. It will help your team or a company implement the best goal setting system currently out there. Filled with a lot of practical example Objectives and Key Results it’s a good quick handbook to launch and implement OKRs in your team.

Objective and Key Results: The Book  – “Objectives and Key Results: The Book” is an advanced guide to the OKR methodology. It suits people who already know a little about the OKR system and are looking to implement it.

Way too many people read something, watch a Youtube video, or attend a conference and get hooked on OKR. Only to fail using it as there was nothing to really help them get from point A (“OKRs will solve my problems”) to point B (“We are actually seeing results. Yay!”). This book will help you with that.

What’s the history of OKRs? When and how did OKRs get started?

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According to the “Step by Step Guide to OKRs”, the history of OKR methodology started its climb to popularity when John Doerr introduced OKRs at Google in 1999. But actually, OKR methodology had been championed even earlier by Andy Grove, the late CEO of Intel during the 1970s.

Doerr has said: “I remember being intrigued with the idea of having a beacon or north star every quarter, which helped set my priorities. It was also incredibly powerful for me to see Andy’s OKRs, my manager’s OKRs, and the OKRs for my peers. I was quickly able to tie my work directly to the company’s goals. I kept my OKRs pinned up in my office and I wrote new OKRs every quarter, and the system has stayed with me ever since.”

The beggining of history of OKRs.

The birth of OKRs can be traced back to Peter Drucker. He was one of the first managerial thinkers. And in the 1950s he introduced a system called “Management by Objectives” (MBOs). That system called for setting objectives for everyone who works in a company. These goals had to “lay out what contributions a given individual and their unit are expected to make to help other units obtain their objectives.”

Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, reshaped the MBO system into a simpler form that answers the questions:

  1. Where do I want to go?
  2. How will I pace myself to get there?

He also suggested objectives should be set more frequently, on a quarterly or monthly basis. Arguing that as the fast-paced world requires constant feedback. He also believed multiple performance management tools should be used in conjunction with OKRs. Finally, he believed OKRs should be stretch goals and achieving them 100 percent should be next to impossible.

Having gotten a lot of leadership lessons from Grove, John Doerr introduced the system to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google.

First OKR software providers

In 2010-2013 many OKR software providers appeared. One of the first was Weekdone, which still is one of the market leaders. OKR software automates the whole process of OKRs. You can try out Weekdone for free here.

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