OKRs: Get Clear Goals With This Technique We Learned From Intel And Google (part 1)

The art and science of OKRs. OKRs are not just a science, there's an art to it as well, a philosophical art, which is why I love this model so much. And do you guys recognize Andrea Gibbs? So Andrea is an A fester. She came to a fest in Sardinia and Andrea is one of the top people at Intel. She won the Intel Achievement award for being one of their 0.1% employees. She was part of the team of 10 people they that invented the smart television. So Andrea invited me to come to Intel. I got a tour of this incredible company and a lot of respect to Intel. The book on OKRs came from Intel. See that guy with the fancy 60s mustache there? Andy Grove? He was an amazing CEO. He made the COVID of Time magazine and he turned intel into one of the most recognizable companies in the world. He helped create the information age and he did it with this concept called okr. So I was really proud to be able to visit intel, see how this company works and to understand how okrs emerged from Intel. And then what happened is it seeped into Google because an ex intel leader by the name of John, John Dower had left intel, started a VC company. He was one of the early investors in Google and he introduced okrs to Google. John Dauer also wrote the book Measure what Matters, the definitive guide on okr. So I strongly recommend, if you like this presentation and you want to go super deep, read that book too. Now okrs help create a long term vision with a short term direction. So you have a long term vision but now you know what you need to work on today and therefore you are so much more efficient and you're able to execute in this vision in baby steps that eventually predictably get you there. So here's a quick definition. Okay, so long term, typically we think of it as strategic goal setting. It's about knowing where you're going. Short term is about everyday tasks and projects. It's about doing the right thing versus being busy. One of the biggest things I notice when I sometimes sit down with people in mindvalley who complain that they are busy and and firstly this is a common thing is often it's because either the failure came from my part or from the manager who was reporting to me. There wasn't a clear vision of where we are going and so people were doing random things that were not aligned. But when we switched to the OKR model alignment happens and what suddenly happens is people now know the right thing to do. So it's about doing the right thing versus being the Right. And okrs trickle down to every single person in our company. So it starts with the top, it goes down to different divisions, it goes down to every single individual. Every single individual has their okrs. Now, okrs were popularized in Google. Google used okrs to basically become one of the greatest companies in the world. And okrs like, they're designed in such a way where they're aspirational, truly aspirational, but they let you know what you need to do directly today to get to that aspirational okr. There's a story about Google in the book in the plex that shares this concept. So Basically, Google acquired YouTube and the team at Google got together and they came up with a big goal for YouTube. It was almost like a 10 year goal. And that goal was, someday we are going to stream 1 billion hours of programming on YouTube in a single 24 hour span. That is an OKR. So it's an objective, a primary objective. Now did they achieve that in that first year? Nope, they failed in the second year, they failed in the third year, they failed in the fourth year. But in year seven, they actually hit 1 billion hours streamed. But you see, that goal, that vision, drove the team to focus like a laser on everything. Every little scientific tweak that was needed on YouTube to make it the dominant TV platform in the world. They figured out how to scale up their servers so they could deliver a billion hours. They figured out how to write the right algorithms so that people wouldn't watch a video and bail, they would stay on YouTube. They figured out how to translate YouTube to different languages. Because to get to a billion hours, it's not just about the US but about the entire world. That single objective trickled down to everybody in YouTube and they became one of the most successful technological innovations in our world. And so Google really popularized this okr concept. So it was invented by Andy Grove, popularized by Google, and it's different from management by objectives. Anybody here heard of MBOs? Management by objectives. Okay, so it's very different from management by objectives. We might go into the differences later, but now let's go into how do we go from your bold vision to your execution. Okay, now the first thing is if you're running a company, CEOs founders, or if you're running a team, you start with an aspirational core purpose. So a lot of people confuse mission, vision, core purpose. Cameron Harrell says it very simply. He says, forget mission, forget vision. They all people toss around those words and people have different definitions. Focus on just one why do you do what you do? Call that your core purpose. That's your mission and your vision all bundled into one. Why are you doing what you're doing? So if you look, I took this photo yesterday, you can see that a lot of people here wrote down, my vision is to increase the energy vibration. My vision is to help people who help people grow. My vision is to give my energy freely to those who need it. My vision is to love the people. My vision is to unify humanity by crossing cultural barriers. Fantastic. But if that is really your vision and that's really important to you, how are you going to execute on it? So our vision used to be fluffy. Our vision at Mindvalley, Our core purpose used to be to help spread enlightened ideas. Awesome. I could start a blog and start blogging and great, I'm spreading enlightened ideas. Big fricking deal. That was a mistake. I had that for about 10 years. And I wish a good mentor had sat me down and said, vishen, Vishen, you're going about this all wrong. And, like, shook me till I adopted okrs. We'll probably be double the size we are right now, but this is our core purpose right now to create the biggest rise in human consciousness our species has ever experienced by 2038, through the transformation of spirituality, politics, education, work, and parenting. Really specific from that. I know I have 20 years, so no pressure that we literally are talking about creating the biggest rise in human transformation. Right. Simply setting up a blog isn't going to do that. The biggest rise and that we're looking at these five pillars, which means I got to start figuring out how to reform global politics, how to reform global spirituality, how to reform education and work and parenting, and start finding the right people and the right experts. But it's still only a core purpose. It doesn't tell me what I need to do today. So there's another step, and that second step is you break your core purpose down into aspirational objectives. Now, in the course of this presentation, I'm going to give you time to go deep and emerge with your core purpose. But before we get there, so I hope you guys have your journals. I want to break down the process for you so you see the next and next and next step. Okay, so you have this big core purpose. Now you break it down to aspirational objectives. Now, aspirational means to inspire people, to get people excited about their work. Here is how we break down our core purpose, which is this, into an aspirational objective. So I'm Actually openly sharing Mindvalley's business plan with you. Feel free to take what you want, feel free to emulate it. Because, look, if we want to create the biggest rise in global consciousness, we need allies. You see anything here you like? And you want to solve this for us? Go ahead, make it part of your company's mission. Because we win together. Okay, so we break it down into five primary objectives. And the objectives are this. Number one, scale to a billion users. Thus far, there have been less than 10 companies in the world that have gotten a billion users. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, all owned by Zuckerberg are three of those companies. YouTube is another one. We want to scale to a billion users. Number two, we want to create a platform to accelerate human transformation. Number three, we want to make organizations, which we define as schools and companies, into an oasis of wellness. Because today, work extracts from us. Work makes us sicker. We want to change that. We want to create a global tribe of change makers. By the way, that has to do with you. And fifth, we want to turn Mindvalley into a lovemark. A lovemark is a particular type of brand that has such a resonance with its customers that people are tattooing it on their skin. So we're going to go deeper because these five things are aspirational. But again, they don't really tell you if you're on the right track. They don't really tell you what to do today. However, what they do is they help us break up our grand core purpose into five steps. Okay, so now we go deeper. You take those five objectives and you break it down into measurable key results. This is really the essence of okr. Core purpose leads to objective leads to key result. So let's look at scale to a billion people. That itself is too fluffy. But when we break it down into these five key results that we are aiming to hit by 2038, it now becomes crystal clear. We need a billion user accounts on the system. We need to reach 200 monthly active users in a given month. That's huge. LinkedIn has 140 million. We want to hit 200 million. We want to grow from 3 languages to 100 languages. We want to grow our reach from 5 million to 500 million. And we want to attain 50 million paying students annually who bring in 5 billion in revenue. So you see, now it's super specific, it's bold, it's ambitious. We have no fucking idea how to get there. But that's the point. Your job isn't to look at where you are, right now and then figure out based on my knowledge, based on what I have right now, I should be here. That's a bullshit way of setting goals. Rather you got to look at where you could be, set that as the goal and then trust that intuition that the right people, that the right opportunities come to you, that you're going to study, you're going to learn, you're going to develop the skills, the connections, you're going to work your freaking ass off, but you're going to get to that goal. You do not need to know the how. You simply at this point need to know the why and the what. The how is going to come with the right okrs. So we have these five goals and we have some idea on how to get to 1 billion users. For example, we are launching an app platform that allows us to create world class apps in every category we want faster than the competition. So that's one of our hows. But ultimately the thing that pushes us forward is scaling to a billion users, being the same size as a company like YouTube or Facebook, but for transformation. Okay, now here's another example. Create a platform to accelerate human transformation. It's our primary objective, but it's fluffy until you break it down. And we break it down into these three things. So attain quest completion rates from 60% to 80%. Maintain an NPS of 70, develop a data driven dynamic curriculum for upgrading the human experience. Now we break it down and we define this to our engineers. So as long as our engineers. So it may be unclear to you, but as long as our engineers know what we mean by data driven dynamic curriculum to upgrade the human experience, we can move in the right path. So you're going to go through the same process. You're going to start with a core purpose. You're going to break it down into five objectives, primary objectives. You're going to further break it down into key results. Now let's look at number three. Make organizations an oasis of wellness. It sounds fluffy until you add the two key results. We want Mindvalley to be embedded in 100 national schooling systems. And number two, we want to be in every Fortune 500 company in the world. Okay, now what you do is as you break it down, you align this across all your teams so you have your company wide okrs. And that is what your leadership team, what your founding team is obsessed with. But you break it down into individual teams. So Mindvalley's okrs give a direction to everybody in our core team. But we take those five elements and we break them down further for individual teams. Imagine if everybody in your company had this level of clarity. Now you get to focus like a laser on what truly matters, knowing that what you're focused on moves upwards to a team okr, moves upwards to accompany okr and directly contributes to. To your core purpose. Everybody get this.