Introduction to OKRs

Chapter 2. An Extremely Short History of OKRs

Since the rise of “management science” in the 1950s, business leaders have embraced a variety of techniques designed to improve their company’s performance. Peter Drucker introduced Management by Objectives (MBOs), a process during which management and employees define and agree upon objectives and what they need to do to achieve them.

MBOs are the clear forerunner of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The idea that a manager would set an objective and then trust his team to accomplish it without micromanaging them was a huge and efficient shift from the more controlling approaches of the industrial age. In many ways, it was the first management philosophy truly aligned with the new information age.

In the early 1980s, SMART goals, developed by George T. Doran, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) became popular methods for organizations to set objectives. KPIs introduced metric-validated performance evaluation for companies. There is an old joke in advertising that “Half our advertising is working. I just don’t know which half.” But the rise of the Internet and data science changed all that. Now, it was possible to know what was working and learn what caused those KPIs to grow.

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused, and Time-bound. Elements of this approach went into OKRs, particularly results-focused and time-bound.

In 1999, John Doerr introduced the OKRs goal-setting methodology to Google, a model he ...