In September 1962, US President John F. Kennedy delivered a historic speech at Rice University, where he declared that by the end of the decade we would land astronauts on the Moon. This became known in history as the first “moonshot goal”.  Seven years later in 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the Moon and the world celebrated. It was more than a historic moment, it was a global victory. 

A decade later in 1979 Andy Grove, then CEO of Intel worked on Moonshot goals and the Objectives + Key Results (OKRs) methodology at Intel to take the company from being a memory company to a trailblazing microprocessor company in the coming years.

Grove taught this OKR system to hundreds of people at Intel, including John Doerr, who famously recorded this framework in a book called 'Measure What Matters' and introduced it to the rest of Silicon Valley, where it spread like wildfire. Thousands of companies today, including industry giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon - owe their success to Grove’s revolutionary, results-focused style of management. 

1. OKRs designed to stretch : When correctly set, OKRs will take you out of your comfort zone - somewhere you never thought you could reach. They enable you to set moonshot goals which are inspiring, imaginative and yet credible. This is where innovation and progress comes from - and its the beauty of OKRs. As Larry Page says: “I live by the gospel of 10x. A 10% improvement means that you’re doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.” 

2. OKRs are bi-directional and flexible: Both Top-down and bottom-up goal setting + tracking is encouraged with complete alignment to reach desired objective. This means that each individual deeply understands their role in achieving the outcome - for themselves, their team, their function, and their organization, as well as encourages other team members to understand each other’s role and support interdependencies. OKRs also enable detailed initiatives or tasks to be defined for each key result that helps drive daily progress towards key results.

Sharing OKRs and results with team members puts positive pressure on performance, because your peers are keenly aware of the objectives + key results you set and achieve. The bidirectional framework gives you the ability & flexibility to iterate your strategy and direction often. While organizational-level OKRs are annual, team & individual OKRs are calibrated quarterly and discussed weekly. The weekly check-ins are structured as simple meetings to review progress, identify + fix issues and course correct continuously.

3. OKRs are deeply focused on your top priorities: Each team needs to focus on at most 5 Objectives, this gets them to think about which Objectives they need to prioritize over others. OKRs thus encourage you to focus your energy and resources on defining what can make an impact today and what can be impactful in future.

As Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon says ‘I very frequently get the question: “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” And that is a very interesting question but I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two - because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff, I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher.” “I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.” Impossible. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.'

To conclude OKRs present a simple, flexible and focused system to help you achieve your Moonshots; as Christina Wodtke mentions in her book Radical Focus, achieving your most important goals with OKRs “One : Set Inspiring and measurable goals. Two : Make sure you and your team are always making progress towards that desired end state. No matter how many other things are on your plate, and Three : set a cadence that makes sure the group remembers what they are trying to accomplish and holds each other accountable.