“I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with Bart den Haak in a community of practice (Agile Fluency® Project). There I’ve appreciated his straightforward approach and willingness to share his insights about OKR’s. Now he has produced this excellent guide to everything you need to know and do for success with OKR’s in your organization. Notice how often he cautions against a superficial implementation. His thoughtful attention to the fundamentals of agile approaches shine through. The many stories of his experiences across industries shows his depth and breadth of knowledge about success and failure patterns. If you’re curious about OKR’s, read this book. Follow den Haak’s guidance. Find your path to directed success.”—Diana Larsen. Co-Author of Agile Retrospectives and Lift off. Co-Founder of the Agile Fluency® Project
“If there is one book to recommend to move your organisation forward with OKRs, it is this book. Many books overcomplicate and make the reader puzzled where and how to start with OKRs.
This book is unique in providing you a comprehensive overview and use of OKRs while guiding you with refreshing use cases, tips and practical steps to make change with OKRs happen in your organization.
Last not least, this book is enjoyable to read and will make you energized making things happen.”—Arran McLean, Senior Product Manager at Aptic AB
“I worry that many potential readers, who would benefit greatly from this book, may be put off just by the mere mention of an ‘OKR’, due to past experiences where OKRs have failed to live up to expectations.
I have been fortunate enough to have worked alongside Bart earlier in my career and have also shared such an experience with him. While I became indifferent, or even skeptical, of OKRs – an opinion compounded, in turn, my meeting others with the same view as the years went on – Bart was different.
Bart saw past OKRs as something pioneered by the mighty Google, but out of reach in reality to the rest of us. Or an over-hyped management silver bullet touted by hungry consultants. He saw the real value in OKRs, as an evolution of established theory and practice in goal setting, which could be further strengthened by the proven principles of Lean Thinking.
By combining his unique insight, decades of collated research and his hands-on experience of knowing how and why OKRs fail, Bart has created Moving the Needle with Lean OKRs; essential and motivating reading for anyone wanting to do just that: move the needle, in their organization.
Moving the Needle with Lean OKRs explains why mission, vision and strategy are paramount to forward-thinking organizations and how setting ambitious, measurable goals, enriched with Lean concepts, can be transformational in realizing them.
The book moves from the theoretical to the more pragmatic side of working with OKRs. This also serves as great reference material to revisit when brushing up on, for example, OKR check-ins or best practices for measuring objectives. It then goes on from the getting started to more advanced topics such as how OKRs relate to team empowerment and cultural and behavioral transformations.
One criticism may be that it reads a little academically at times, but conversely this style serves as a goldmine of references for those wanting to continue exploring the subject in more depth.
In summary, Moving the Needle with Lean OKRs is an incredibly comprehensive and essential addition to the bookshelves of those wanting tangible concepts and practices for realizing their, and of their organization’s ambitions; even stretching those ambitions to something you may not have thought possible.”—Phil Mander, VP of Technology at Harver
“The topic of OKRs has been on my radar since 2014 when I observed its failure first hand. Since then I was both fascinated by its simplicity and all the success stories as much as anxious to start implementing it, as I know doing it wrong inevitably leads to more harm than value.
I knew Bart long before he started to write the book and I have trusted him to come and help us implement OKRs the “right way” and one of the reasons I’ve trusted him is his pragmatic Lean approach that he describes in this book in great detail. Although we are still in the middle of our journey, this approach was instrumental in getting us to where we are right now. None of the methods or practices is a silver bullet and will not give you an answer about your own strategy or objectives. Bart guided us towards figuring out exactly that by asking the right questions and bringing us back to the reason why we are doing OKRs in the first place.
In his book, Bart has managed to combine the broad wisdom of the industry knowledge and project it into the simple yet difficult to get it done right topic of OKRs. There are many books on OKRs today, but very little of them go one step further and describe the opinionated way to implement OKRs to actually leverage the full potential, going from fundamentals of how to define the impactful objectives and outcome-driven Key Results to review cycles and alignment workshops.”—Ben Goldin, CTO of Mambu, The Cloud Banking Platform
“Implementing OKR is hard. Writing a book about it should be harder than imagined, but Burt makes it very easy going with real life experiences.
And when you think that you already know everything about OKR, it is when you read only the first chapter of this book and you understand that there is still much to discover and learn.
As an OKR fan and ambassador, this book reconnected me to the very essence of the system: simplicity to achieve great things.”—Tomás Pando, Co-Founder Master Me Up, Partner at Sunamers and Angel Investor at Aivo
“Moving the Needle with Lean OKRs” will be a great companion to any effort to implement OKRs. The book will not convince anyone to the method, this job is already done by books from Doerr and Wodtke. But it may serve as a field book, an inspiration and reference guide which shows approaches and points to various sources about “all things OKRs”. There are many of them and Bart’s knowledge here is impressive. His experience with OKRs is among the longest in the world, it would be a mistake not to learn from him.”—Tomasz Bienias. OKRy.pl
“Bart has put great effort in sharing all his knowledge and experience on OKR’s in a comprehensive do-it-yourself guide. It explains everything from the OKR concepts to defining your own KPI’s and putting them in practice to improve your results. This has resulted in a standard work for everyone interested in achieving great results.”—Maurits Cieremans, Tribe Lead, Mortgages, ING The Netherlands