A short YouTube interview in which Ahmed Khan names his favorite business book from the past year as Measure What Matters and explains why the book (about OKRs/objectives and key results) helped him create clearer, paper-based plans with step-by-step objectives, measurable key results, deadlines, and daily/weekly execution. He argues the framework reduces wasted activity and forces questioning of whether daily tasks align to objectives.
So number one, what would it be your favorite business book that you've read in the past year? Something that you've read that you've taken on board and then put into your business? If you've got any ones, you can share on that.
So there's a book I read recently, it's called Measure what Matters. It's not the most exciting read, it's a bit of a dull read, but it's written by a person who actually built a management framework within Google. So it's a guy who was already high up in Silicon Valley and it's a book written by him, a billionaire guy. Now what's interesting about that book and the reason I like it is because, you know, as you know, a lot of people have great goals and they've got a big vision that this is what I want to achieve. But then in reality, most people have the vision, they've got the goals, but they don't actually have a plan to get to that goal. They don't have a vision, you know, they don't have a step by step layout or how am I going to get there? So I feel a lot of people, they've got these amazing goals but they don't have a clear road path. Well, how am I going to get there with, you know, with set deadlines, with set steps and if you, if you don't know how you're going to get there on a piece of paper, then it's, it's very unlikely you're going to get that get there in practice because you know, if you have no idea what you're doing on a day to day basis in order to get somewhere within the next 12 months or 18 months and you can't put that on a piece of paper and can't work out. Well, this is what I introduced. Step one, step two, step three, then how would you execute in the real world, right? How do you execute on a day to day if you can't execute on a piece of paper? So what this book allows you to do is basically you write down your objectives and you write down the key results you need to hit in order to get to that objective. And if you actually follow the exercises properly within the book, it's actually very, very hard because it makes you question, well why am I doing certain things? Because these things don't actually allow me to reach where I'm reaching, right? Because if you stop looking at every small thing you're doing on a day to day basis. So should I be doing this or should I be doing that and you have your objective on the top and your key steps. It really makes you question why you're doing certain things and it makes you think, well, what should I be doing to get to that stage? Because my belief is if you can't plan out how you're going to get there on a piece of paper, then there is almost no chance you can actually pull it off because it's like you don't know what to do on a day to day basis. So I think it's a really good book for pretty much everyone because most people have goals, but I don't got a set, set strategy of getting there. So if you follow the exercise and you follow the framework which is laid out in the book, it will give you a lot of clarity of what you should be doing on a day to day, on a week to week basis. So that's the book I would recommend to everyone because I was doing a lot of things which were good things, they help build brand and all that sort of stuff. But I could be doing things which are better or things which are more aligned to where I'm trying to get to. It just helps you get rid of a lot of the waste activities and helps you focus on the things you really should be doing. So that's the book I recommend.
And is that why you picked up the book in the first place? Did you feel like you needed a bit of help guiding you from A to B? Or was there other reasons?
No, it was, it was pretty much that. Which is. I read this book towards the end of last year, start of this year, when I was planning for the year ahead. And in my head I kind of, I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn't entirely sure. Well, because I, you know what happens is as you start doing, as you start to grow your business, you get a lot of opportunities come to you, right? Different people come to you, different things, different opportunities and you're trying to evaluate them. Well, should I be doing this or should I be doing that? And you only have 24 hours in a day and I needed a way of working out what exactly should I be doing to get to where I want to get to. I didn't want to spend a year and then realize, well, yeah, I did X, Y and Z and that was, it was great and I met more people. Did it actually help me achieve what I was trying to achieve or do I just do more things to kind of say at the end of the year, well, I did this and I did this and I did this. But you know, what did that lead to? Did that actually lead to you getting to where you wanted to get to?
