5 best books on OKRs

5 best books on OKRs

OKRs are a trending topic at the moment. A lot of companies introduced them lately or are about to adapt to the framework. Objectives and Key Results are a great way to help companies align goals and ensure everyone is working collaboratively on things that really matter. This works on a company-scale but also on a team-level. We've collected five great resources that help you understand the framework of OKRs, explain why and how they can be implemented, and give you lots of great real-life examples.

Measure what matters

Measure what matters

How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
by John Doerr, Larry Page

Why read?

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth — and how it can help any organization thrive.

320 pages, 2018

Radical Focus

Radical Focus

Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results
by Christina Wodtke

Why read?

Ready to move your team in the right direction? Read this book together, and learn Wodtke’s powerful system of decision making to create your focus and find success.

166 pages, 2016

Objectives and Key Results

Objectives and Key Results

Driving Focus, Alignment, and Engagement with OKRs
by Paul R. Niven, Ben Lamorte

Why read?

Objectives and Key Results is the first full-fledged reference guide on Objectives and Key Results, a critical thinking framework designed to help organizations create value through focus, alignment, and better communication. Written by two leading OKRs consultants and researchers, this book provides a one-stop resource for organizations looking to quantify qualitative goals and ensure each team focuses their efforts to make measureable progress on their most important goals. You’ll learn how OKRs came to be and how leading companies use them every day to help teams and employees stretch their thinking about what’s possible, build their goal-setting muscles and achieve results that reflect their full potential. From the basic framework to a detailed dissection of best practices, this informative guide walks you through real-world implementations to help you get the most out of OKRs.

244 pages, 2018

OKRs At The Center

OKRs At The Center

How to use goals to drive ongoing change and create the organization you want
by Natalija Hellesoe, Sonja Mewes

Why read?

Companies today are using OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—to improve the way they set and work with goals. Along the way, they discover something else: changing the way you work with goals can lead to other changes. Changes in how you plan work, how you lead and reward people, how you make decisions, how you budget, and so much more. In short, if you really, sincerely start pursuing goal- setting in a new way, you will discover that goals live at the center of everything you do. What’s exciting about this is where it leads: Changing how you work with goals has the potential to drive ongoing change and bring new ways of working to the whole organization. That’s what this book is about: how goals live at the center of your organizational system and how you can leverage their potential for organizational development by adopting OKRs in an intentional way.

96 pages, 2020

OKRs, From Mission to Metrics

OKRs, From Mission to Metrics

How Objectives and Key Results can help your organization achieve great things
by Francisco S. Homem de Mello

Why read?

“OKRs have helped us on the road to growth many, many times” -Larry Page, co-founder of GoogleWhat Google, Intel, Zynga, Linkedin, and The Gates Foundation have in common? OKRs. OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, translate a company’s vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. They offer a balance between long-term goals and short-term planning; between outcomes that are desired by the organization and actual performance KPIs that measure these outcomes; between the results we want to achieve and the efforts needed to do it. Francisco H. de Mello, founder of Qulture.Rocks, a Y Combinator alumn and the leading strategy execution company, takes you through the history of using goals for management, from MBOs to OKRs, and presents OKRs with a focus on how you can implement them at your company.

145 pages, 2018