As context for the current state of OKRs, let's go back to where it all started. In the late 1970s, Andy Grove introduced OKRs as an evolution of Management by Objectives (MBOs). Grove was then the CEO of Intel. As key executives left the company, they spread the word on OKRs to emerging big players such as Oracle in the 1980s and Google in the 1990s. By 2010, dozens of tech companies in Silicon Valley were using OKRs as a system for defining and achieving their most important goals.1 So, if OKRs had been around for nearly 50 years, why the sudden interest in OKRs in 2013? Short answer: Google.
@klau tweet: "My OKRs video just passed 150,000 views. That's about 149k more than I thought it'd get."
In 2014, when the CEO of Sears viewed Klau's video, he immediately rolled out OKRs across the entire organization. Sears Holding Company is not a tech company by anyone's definition. The introduction of OKRs at Sears exemplified its expanding popularity and is just one of many examples of the growth of OKRs across business sectors.
With the popularity of OKRs gaining traction, business leaders and management consultants from all over the world began approaching OKRs coaches for both coaching and support. In 2016, Christina Wodtke published Radical Focus, the first book dedicated to the topic of OKRs. Later, in 2016, the book Objectives and Key Results, by Niven and Lamorte, introduced the steps for deploying OKRs. This book offered case studies from organizations around the world, as the interest in OKRs was growing outside the United States. Both Radical Focus and Objectives and Key Results became essential reading for anyone interested in OKRs, and both were translated into several languages.
In 2017, I made multiple trips to China, where I partnered with Beisen, a leading HR software company based in Beijing. I delivered a series of OKRs training workshops in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen to certify 200 business leaders. During one of these trips to China, I was lucky enough to spend a couple days with executives at Huawei, one of China's leading technology companies. At Huawei, I met Kuang Yang, an OKRs expert who not only translated the OKRs book I coauthored, but also went on to write the first book dedicated to OKRs written in Chinese.3 Kuang explained that the impact of Huawei's success with OKRs in China was comparable to the impact of Google's success with OKRs on tech companies in the United States.
By the end of 2017, OKRs were taking off across the globe. In addition to collaborating with organizations in China, I had clients based in Singapore, Australia, Poland, South Africa, France, Germany, Israel, India, Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Canada. However, even in 2017 the demand for OKRs coaching was still nascent. In early 2018, I had roughly one call per week with a different company exploring OKRs. I continued to allocate a portion of my time to marketing efforts such as speaking on OKRs and posting content to The OKRs Blog on OKRs.com. But then 2018 happened.
The interest in OKRs started to grow exponentially after John Doerr's book on OKRs, Measure What Matters, hit the market in April of 2018. The stories in Doerr's book featured big names like Bono and Bill Gates. With a growing interest in OKRs came an increased demand for OKRs coaching. I shifted my focus exclusively to deliver OKRs coaching to my clients. I finally had the problem I always wanted: too many leads...
