OKRS, KPIS, ETFS, IRAS, AND ROIS! What do all these letters stand for and how do you interpret them? These letters are just acronyms that we are supposed to remember about business and finance, similar to how physicians and drug companies like to use unpronounceable names like Talimogene and Laherparepvec. Unfortunately, we can’t change the naming conventions but for us in the swim world, if you have never heard of OKRs, this is the one you should consider understanding!
REVIEW BY JOANI & CLIFF MASKELL SWIMMING SAFARI SWIM SCHOOL
John Doerr wrote a book called “Measure What Matters” which he tries to explain OKRs and how they can be used in your business. He also has two free websites that provide both an interview https://www.measurewahtmatters.com with Doerr and a free course https://www.whatmatters.com on OKRs. The interview is about 30 minutes long and the course takes a couple of hours if you take notes. (Both are highly recommended!) Like updating your company’s website, all companies must keep updating their processes to stay relevant. Of the 500 companies in the 1952 Fortune 500 list, only 52 of these companies still exist, in their same form in 2019. The service industry has gone through even more changes and closures since Covid started. Doerr’s book talks about how his background at Intel and Sun Micosystems, led him to realize the benefit of making goals and measuring them. He was an initial investor as well as on the board at Google. Doerr’s advice to Google’s founders, Sergery Brin and Larry Page, was to use OKRs. Google implemented OKRs at the very start of the company’s existence and they are still being used at Google today. To show his gratitude toward John Doerr, Larry Page wrote the “Forward” to “Measure What Matters” and describes his understanding of how Google presently uses OKRs and how he embraces this book, saying he wished he had read this book 20 years ago. THE OKR SYSTEM OKRs is a robust goal setting and tracking system. OKRs help bring the team together and help give focus on what matters most for the business. Setting goals, by using OKRs, increases employee commitment and the “buy-in” that companies want for their team. It’s easy to recognize the names of some of the companies that have adopted the OKR system. They include Airbnb, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Gap, Lear, Deloitte, and Adobe.
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