Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
by Richard Rumelt · Crown Business
Richard Rumelt sets out the kernel of strategy (diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent action) and names the marks of bad strategy, including fluff and mistaking goals for strategy. It supplies the strategy layer that OKRs are supposed to carry out.
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More resources on OKRs & Strategy Execution
OKR Guide by re:Work
Google's re:Work guide to setting Objectives and Key Results: how to write ambitious objectives and measurable key results, grade them on a 0.0-1.0 scale, and run quarterly OKR cycles, with examples drawn from Google's own practice.
Team Objectives (article series)
Marty Cagan's 2020 series on why most companies fail with OKRs: feature teams versus empowered teams, manager-assigned objectives, and missing leadership. Linked essays cover empowerment, ambition, commitments, collaboration, weekly management and accountability. The strongest free critical take on where OKRs break down, balancing the more promotional sources.
Radical Focus (Second Edition): Achieving Your Goals with Objectives and Key Results
Short fable about a struggling startup adopting OKRs, followed by a practical section on writing objectives and key results, weekly check-ins and Friday wins, and the failure modes teams hit in their first quarters. Covers how to run OKRs week to week, which Grove and Google's guide leave out.
How Google Sets Goals: OKRs (Startup Lab Workshop)
Rick Klau of Google Ventures presents part of John Doerr's original 1999 OKR deck to Google, then explains how Google applied OKRs over the years, using his own Blogger product-manager OKRs as worked examples of grading and public goals.
Guide: Set Goals with OKRs
Google's internal-practice guide to OKRs: origins at Intel, writing ambitious objectives and measurable key results, 0–1.0 grading with 0.6–0.7 as the target, cascading from company to team, common mistakes, and quarterly review cadence.