Measuring What Matters

#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

In an online and social media world, measurement is the key to success If you can measure your key business relationships, you can improve them. Even though relationships are "fuzzy and intangible," they can be measured and managed-with powerful results. Measure What Matters explains simple, step-by-step procedures for measuring customers, social media reputation, influence and authority, the media, and other key constituencies. Based on hundreds of case studies about how organizations have used measurement to improve their reputations, strengthen their bottom lines, and improve efficiencies all around Learn how to collect the data that will help you better understand your competition, do strategic planning, understand key strengths and weaknesses, and better respond to customer preferences Author runs a successful blog and serves as a measurement consultant to companies such as Facebook, Southwest Airlines, Raytheon, and Allstate Don't draw conclusions or make key decisions based on guesswork. Instead, Measure What Matters and the difference will show in the most important measure: your bottom line.

An argument that choice-based, process-oriented educational assessments are more effective than static assessments of fact retrieval. If a fundamental goal of education is to prepare students to act independently in the world--in other words, to make good choices--an ideal educational assessment would measure how well we are preparing students to do so. Current assessments, however, focus almost exclusively on how much knowledge students have accrued and can retrieve. In Measuring What Matters Most, Daniel Schwartz and Dylan Arena argue that choice should be the interpretive framework within which learning assessments are organized. Digital technologies, they suggest, make this possible; interactive assessments can evaluate students in a context of choosing whether, what, how, and when to learn. Schwartz and Arena view choice not as an instructional ingredient to improve learning but as the outcome of learning. Because assessments shape public perception about what is useful and valued in education, choice-based assessments would provide a powerful lever in this reorientation in how people think about learning. Schwartz and Arena consider both theoretical and practical matters. They provide an anchoring example of a computerized, choice-based assessment, argue that knowledge-based assessments are a mismatch for our educational aims, offer concrete examples of choice-based assessments that reveal what knowledge-based assessments cannot, and analyze the practice of designing assessments. Because high variability leads to innovation, they suggest democratizing assessment design to generate as many instances as possible. Finally, they consider the most difficult aspect of assessment: fairness. Choice-based assessments, they argue, shed helpful light on fairness considerations.

Measure What Matters to Customers reveals how to capitalize on Key Predictive Indicators (KPIs), the innovative measures that define the success of your enterprise as your customers do. If you want to increase your company's profits by working smarter, this is the book for you.

Following a fictional bookstore's distribution center through the process, the book offers a rare combination of solid theory and dozens of field-tested diagnostic tools, care study dialogue and reproducible exercises and worksheets to measure the collaborative give and take, the exchange value between work teams and the core stakeholders: customers, employers and owners.

To design, implement and monitor effective child well-being policies, policy-makers need data that better capture children's lives, measure what is important to them and detect emerging problems and vulnerabilities early on. Despite improvements in recent decades, there are still important gaps in both national and cross-national child data. Countries can achieve progress if the right actions are taken. Measuring What Matters for Child Well-being and Policies lays the groundwork for improved child well-being measurement and better data to inform better child well-being policies. It outlines an “aspirational” framework for child well-being measurement, setting out which aspects of children's lives should be measured, and how, to better monitor child well-being. It also outlines priorities for child data development and identifies key data gaps, all with the aim of motivating improvements in child data infrastructures.

Measure what matters for deeper learning Getting at the heart of what matters for students is key to deeper learning that connects with their lives, but what good is knowing what matters without also understanding how to bring it to life? What does it really take to know who students are, what they are truly learning, and why? Measuring Human Return solves this dilemma with a comprehensive, systematic process for measuring deeper learning outcomes. Educators will learn to assess students’ self-understanding, knowledge, competencies, and connections through vignettes, case studies, learning experiences and tools. The book helps readers: Develop key system capabilities to build the foundation for sustainable engagement, measurement, and change Discover five comprehensive "frames" for measuring deeper learning Engage in the process of collaborative inquiry Commit to the central, active role of learners by engaging them as partners in every aspect of their learning Discover how to take an authentic, formative, and inquiry-driven approach to measuring the outcomes that drive deeper learning. The book really hits the mark. The best thing about it is the in-depth discussion of systems. It is with great pleasure that I read and re-read this book. It delivers a good combination of big vision with specific strategies and techniques. Jeff Beaudry, Professor, Educational Leadership; University of Southern Maine; Portland, ME This is just what we need in our district. This engaging book will help Change Teams support their systems to effectively measure deeper learning. Readers will be drawn in by great examples from around the globe of educators putting students first. This energizing book calls us to take action for all of our students today and for our future. Charisse Berner, Director of Teaching and Learning, Curriculum; Bellingham Public Schools; Bellingham, WA

The international community has become increasingly interested in measuring the effectiveness of its activities in war-affected environments. This interest is partially motivated by a need to calculate the costs of these very expensive ventures and partially by the recognition that activities have not always been successful. While stakeholders are interested in measuring the effectiveness of their work in places like Afghanistan, they may be reticent to discover that their military, policing, and humanitarian activities are ineffectual or, worse, have had negative effects on recipient populations recovering from armed conflicts. Sarah Jane Meharg analyses why various mechanisms - results-based management, measures of effectiveness, log frames, essential task matrices - are used in attempts to reduce complex intervention activities to simple success stories. She argues that the stakeholders involved could benefit from a deeper understanding of the theories, concepts, philosophies, and assumptions of other stakeholders in the peace operations and crisis management environment. She suggests ways to achieve this understanding through the strategic exercise of measuring effectiveness in relation to organizational requirements and recipient population's priorities in post-conflict societies.Measuring What Matters in Peace Operations and Crisis Managementprovides policy advice on stakeholder approaches and advances the thinking on measuring progress in general. Primary field research for this book was conducted by Canada's Pearson Peacekeeping Centre.