I’ve gone entirely off the reservation (send help, or biscuits) and decided, in a fit of masochistic curiosity, to crack open Measure What Matters by John Doerr—a business management tome that’s been gathering dust on my shelf longer than most CEOs last in post.
Spoiler Alert: I won’t be finishing it. Nor, frankly, should you.
Full disclosure before we all get the wrong idea: I find self-help books about as nourishing as a rice cake made of existential despair. Add “business” or “management” into the mix, and you’re cooking up something so vapid it could qualify as a greenhouse gas.
Measure What Matters reads less like a serious work of business philosophy and more like a self-important infomercial, peddling the sort of common sense you could overhear in a pub toilet after three pints. And, like any decent infomercial, it’s drenched in “inspirational” stories so grandiose you’d think Moses himself was consulting for Google.
I’m sure Doerr genuinely believes he’s handing down managerial tablets from Mount Sinai, and I’m equally sure he’s eating his own dog food with a knife and fork. But what gets served up here is a steaming dish of selection bias, smothered with a rich gravy of hand-waving nonsense.
What am I getting my knickers in a twist about? What’s this book actually about?
In short: three letters—OKR. That’s Objectives and Key Results, for those of you not fluent in MBA-speak. These mystical artefacts, these sacred runes, are supposed to propel your company from the gutter to the stars. Intel did it. Google did it. Ergo, you too can join the pantheon of tech demi-gods. (Provided, of course, you were already a billion-dollar operation before you started.)
Nobody’s going to argue that having goals is a bad idea. Nobody’s throwing the baby out with the Gantt chart. But goals are nebulous, wishy-washy things. “I want to travel” is a goal. “I will cycle and kayak my way to Edinburgh by the end of the year, preferably without dying in a ditch”—that’s an objective.
Businesses, being the lumbering beasts they are, naturally have goals. Goals for products, customers, market share, quarterly bonuses, and ritualistic victory dances in front of their crushed competitors. Nothing new there.
According to Doerr and the gospel of OKRs, however, the only thing standing between you and unassailable market dominance is the right set of buzzwords stapled to your quarterly reports. Apparently, Intel crushed Motorola not because of innovation, talent, or dumb luck—but because they set better OKRs. (History books, please update yourselves accordingly.)
But wait, what’s an OKR again? Ah yes: we’ve done Objectives. Now for the Key Results bit. Basically, you slap some numbers on your wish list. If you’ve survived in business longer than a fruit fly, you’ve already met KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)—another Three Letter Acronym, because we live and die by alphabet soup. Key Results are KPIs wearing slightly trendier trainers.
Example: “We will be number one by the third quarter by prospecting a dozen companies and closing three deals by September.” Marvellous. Life-changing. Nobel-worthy. Now go forth and conquer.
Right. Now that I’ve saved you twenty quid and several hours of your life, let’s talk about why this book is still an exercise in masturbatory futility.
First, and most fatally, it’s predicated on selection bias so profound it should come with a health warning. Allow me to paint you a picture. Imagine we’re advising a football league. Every team sets OKRs: target weights, goal tallies, tackles, penalty avoidance—the works. Everyone’s focused. Everyone’s motivated. Everyone’s measuring What Matters™.
Come the end of the season, who wins? One team. Did they win because their OKRs were shinier? Because they ‘wanted it more’? Or, just maybe, did they win because competition is brutal, random, and often unfair?
This is the problem with false meritocracies and the illusion of control. It’s like thanking God for your touchdown while assuming the other team were all godless heathens who deserved to lose. It’s the same nonsense, in a suit and tie.
Will our winning team win next year? Doubtful. Did Intel lose ground later because they forgot how to spell OKR? No. Because the world changes, markets collapse, and sometimes you’re just standing on the wrong bit of deck when the ship goes down.
Then there’s the love affair with plans. In theory, lovely. In practice, arbitrary. You can set as many Objectives as you like, but what counts as a “win”? Is it profit? Market share? Not dying of ennui?
The free market worshippers among us love to preach that governments can’t plan effectively, unlike the rugged gladiators of capitalism. Funny how businesses, in their infinite wisdom, are then urged to behave like microcosmic Soviet Five-Year Planners, drowning in metrics and objectives. Topically, we are living through the charming consequences of governments trying to run themselves like corporations—newsflash: it’s not going splendidly.
In short: companies are not nations, and OKRs are not magic bullets.
What else is wrong with this book?
Well, to start: it’s shallow. It’s smug. It peddles survivorship bias with the zeal of a televangelist. It confuses correlation with causation like an over-eager undergraduate. And most damning of all, it sells you the fantasy that success is just a matter of writing smarter lists, as if strategy, luck, market forces, and human frailty were irrelevant footnotes.
Measure What Matters doesn’t measure anything except the reader’s patience—and mine ran out somewhere around chapter five.
Philosophics 