Based on The Art of Scale book, Chapter 17.

When Google was a scrappy startup of 20, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brilliant engineers but inexperienced leaders. By 2000, with explosive growth looming, early investor John Doerr knew they would not survive the growth that was coming with their management approach. They needed a scalable system – like the genius OKR system invented at Intel by Andy Grove.

He introduced them to the game-changing approach to leadership that aligned their fast-growing team with measurable strategic goals and clear accountability, while keeping them agile. The OKR system is still alive and well at Google today, and has been a key enabler of Google’s success. The OKR system quickly became a critical leadership technology enabling the rapid growth of Silicon Valley firms since then, and scale-ups around the world have been adopting the leadership innovation ever since.

The reason is: it works. Great firms become great by consistently setting and achieving the right goals. That’s only possible through a team and system that maintains a state of clear focus, alignment, commitment and accountability. Sustaining that high performance state in a scale-up is hard – the whirlwind works to derail your team daily. The OKR system in the hands of good leaders is how you do it.

How OKRs Align each person’s work to company goals

OKRs combine inspiring objectives with measurable outcomes. For example:

• Objective: Launch a game-changing product in Q4.
• Key Results: Finalize R&D by March, secure 5 beta testers by May, and achieve 95% positive feedback by August.

Cascading OKRs aligns individual efforts to company goals, creating a clear path from daily work to achieving your most important goals.

Why Alignment Matters

Think of your business using the metaphor of a solar power plant that reflects the sun’s energy off thousands of mirrors, onto a single point. The energy needed to fire the turbine is there, but if every mirror is not aligned in the right way, the energy is reflected into empty space, wasted, and the turbine does not fire.

Your team is like that: if every team member is not aligned with the organisation’s goals, their energy is wasted, and that’s when execution fails. Without the equivalent of a well-run OKR system, teams pull in different directions, wasting effort and missing opportunities. But the good news is implementing OKRs reverses that, producing focus and alignment, acting as a force multiplier and progress accelerator.

So, Discipline #2 of the Art of Execution is about aligning your team with clear structure (roles, accountabilities, reporting lines) and goals, or OKRs. This ensures every team member knows what they are accountable to contribute, and how their work ties into the bigger picture.

For a guide to implementing OKRs and the Art of Execution, see The Art Of Scale (the book), chapter X-Y, and ArtofScale.io for free tools and resources.

Key Takeaways

• Alignment starts with structure: Organize your team to reflect your strategic priorities.
• Clarity drives accountability: Ensure every role has clear ownership of results.
• OKRs translate vision into action: Set quarterly goals to align team efforts with the BHAG.

OKRs on their own won’t get the job done. The Art of Execution requires getting all 7 Disciplines right. In our next post, we’ll explore Discipline #3: Align Incentives to Company Goals—because what gets rewarded gets done.

Resources

• OKR Toolkit [Download on ArtofScale.io, click here]
• OKR Scaling Guides: Your step-by-step guide to implementing the OKR system. [See ArtOfScale.io, Scaling Guides, Art of Execution Part 3 and 4, click here to access].

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