Radical Focus

Reading this right after Brandon Sanderson might have been a mistake, but I basically got it as home-work from one of my mentors. The fake story is written like a school essay, but at least the ideas in this are good.

Notes & Highlights

It’s not important to protect an idea. It’s important to protect the time it takes to make it real.

“When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.” —Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn

OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results. The form of the OKRs has been more or less standardized. The Objective is qualitative, and the Key Results (most often three) are quantitative.

Studies show that women will not apply for a job unless they are one-hundred-percent qualified, while men will apply when they are sixty-percent qualified. If you only list what you absolutely need in a candidate, you will get a bigger pool of prospects.

The sweet spot for OKRs is somewhere in the 60–70% range. Scoring lower may mean the organization is not achieving enough of what it could be. Scoring higher may mean the aspirational goals are not being set high enough.