Fewer goals, measured: the discipline of saying no

Ask a Leadership Team how many priorities it has this quarter and the honest answer is often a number nobody wants to say out loud. Eight. Twelve. Whatever fits on the whiteboard.

Every one of them is a good idea. That is the problem. Good ideas are easy to add and hard to cut, so the list grows, and a long list quietly stops working as a list of priorities.

What Doerr's book gets right

John Doerr's Measure What Matters lays out OKRs, the goal system Andy Grove built at Intel and Doerr later brought to Google. The structure is simple. An objective says what you want to achieve in plain words. Three to five key results say how you will know you got there, and each one has a number.

The format is not the hard part. The hard part is the discipline behind it: saying no to good goals so a few can get done. A team that tries to move twelve things at once usually moves none of them far.

Why Leadership Teams drift toward long lists

Leadership Teams are full of capable people doing the work in front of them. Maximizing growth or finding the growth in your data might not be their focus. They are generous with their yeses, too. Every real issue deserves attention, and the weekly L10 meeting surfaces a new one each time. The Issues List grows faster than anyone can work it, and priorities grow with it.

Nobody is failing. A long list is what capable, caring people produce when nothing forces a choice. It takes a number to force one.

The number is what makes it a goal

Compare two lines on a quarterly plan:

• Improve client retention.
• Lift 12-month client retention from 82% to 88% by the end of the quarter. (The numbers here are illustrative; use your own.)

The first is a hope. Everyone can agree with it and nobody can tell whether it happened. The second can be checked on the last day of the quarter, which means it can also be checked halfway through, while there is still time to change course.

If you cannot write the number, the goal is not finished yet. That is useful information, not a failure. It usually means the team has not agreed on what success looks like.

Try this with your Leadership Team

1. Put your current priorities on one page. All of them, including the ones everyone has quietly stopped mentioning.
2. Cut the list to three. Ask which three, if finished, would matter most to the year. Expect some disagreement. That conversation is the point.
3. Write the number for each. What will be true, in a figure, when it is done?
4. Give each one an owner. One name, not a committee. When everyone owns something, no one does.

What happens to the goals you cut? They go on a parking list, not in the bin. Some will matter next quarter. Writing them down makes it easier to let them wait.

How this connects to your Growth Plan

A Growth Plan works the same way. It does not ask a team to track everything. It picks the few Growth Levers that explain most of the gap between where revenue is and where the plan says it should be, and gives each one a number and an owner. We cover how to find them in How to find the few Growth Levers that actually move revenue.

On a Dashboard built from your own data, that discipline is visible every month. Each gauge shows one number against the plan, the trend and forecast, and the name of the person who owns it. A forecast is a projection, not a promise, but it shows whether the few goals you chose are on pace. If you want to go one step further, Lead measures vs. lag measures shows how to choose numbers your team can move this week.

One question for your next meeting

How many priorities does your Leadership Team have right now, and which of them has a number?

To see how your company compares, take the Growth Benchmark. It takes about two minutes.