Measure What Matters – John Doerr

Readers are Leaders. When you read, some books leave a lasting impact on you and will help  change life (or) company habits. Measure What Matters, John Doerr is one such book.

We have had quarterly goals at DCKAP and been doing it for a few years. The same has had a big impact to our organization’s productivity. One thing we didn’t do was set Goals for the CEO (though a few employees asked about it). I thought my goals need not be shared and could be kept personal for me to track. After reading John’s book, one of the first things I did was publish my goal on the company forum.  Everyone in the company knows what our priorities are and will focus on the right things.

After reading this book, another thing we did as a company was refine our Goals with OKR’s. John talks about OKR’s extensively in his book (Objective, and Key Results).  We also published everyone’s goals so anyone in the organization could see what their peers (or) anyone including the CEO is working on. (Great Idea) – Thanks John.

Merit trumps seniority, Training, Hailing small achievements and Culture were other learnings from the book.

Measure What Matters also helped learn about other companies (MyFitnessPal, Intuit, Gates Foundation and a host of others) and had sections written by the respective CEO’s or leaders. It was inspirational to learn from them. Andy Grove, Bill Campbell (The Coach) have mentions throughout the book. It was nice of John to provide credits to all these visionaries.

Thanks John for writing this book. Your book and learnings will have a big impact on companies across the world.

Thanks to Aliso Viejo, CA Library for lending me this book to read.