The book with subtitle ‘The Simple Idea That Drives 10x Growth’ from one of the first Google investors, praised by Larry Page and Bill Gates must show some hidden knowledge?

In a certain way - it does, more of a case study, or rather a story-set where OKRs helped the growth or efficiency to a set of companies. You’d hear about how the Intel-born framework made their way into an early Google and a number of other organizations through A-list investors, coaches, and CEOs.

I’m putting a link to Goodreads with explicit mention this time, while it’s overall a bestseller, few top comments underline the confusion it may cause, they’d say:

• You’d see that OKRs setting described is flexible to the point of not being something explicit but rather ‘It’s good to put numbers to objective’
• One is unlikely to learn ‘how’ to pick the right ones, because, from the point above, the closest mentioned meaning is ‘pick an aspirationally arbitrary number’ (like 111M for Chrome users or 1B for Youtube ones)

It hints at specific thing done by design - OKRs are a way to set goals and get aligned results in organization. The ‘but’ here - it’s not data-driven, scientific (the book has very little, if any, cited works) or especially clever, it’s indeed a ‘Simple Idea’, and just that.

Throughout many examples, one could start seeing the forgotten remnants and birth sin of the framework - Waterfall project management! Although, per the content in the book and experience, it does not go that far into planning ‘what’, of course, because primarily it’s organizational system, so differs in having metriced goals coming down at the end straight to individuals, including comprehensive performance assessment.

To finalize and keep it a as review - it reads pretty easy but stays very high-level and too high profile. Meaning, that as an OKR education - that is more of a corporate C-level book, where ambitious/stretched goals are praised and evaluated by the execution of the rather large teams. And examples of that it has indeed, from chapters with Pichai, and Wojcicki - of Google and YouTube “earlier days”, to Bono’ non-profits story and Zume Pizza. The last one especially hints that brilliant at the time (probably 2017) high-profile venture investments and operations might be built on questionable plans and didn’t necessarily stand the test of time.

All in all - to learn more about practically operationalizing OKRs, probably few blog posts will do a better job. However, to understand a bit deeper context of how they are created and why indeed so popular and efficient - yes, the book may shed some light on that.