The Gospel of 10x

Definition

The fourth OKR "superpower": Google splits its objectives into two baskets. Committed objectives — tied to metrics like product releases, bookings, and hiring — are meant to be hit at 100 percent. Aspirational (stretch) objectives are bigger, riskier, and expected to fail at an average rate of 40 percent; missing one is not a failure of execution but evidence the goal was appropriately ambitious. Doerr cites Edwin Locke's research that harder goals reliably produce higher performance than easy ones, even though they're reached less often, and calls stretch goals "achievements on the border between abilities and dreams."

In the Book

Chapter 12 opens with Intel's Operation Crush, where the sales task force set a target of 2,000 microprocessor "design wins" — nearly triple the prior year's pace, on a chip customers were actively hanging up on salespeople about. The number was chosen, in Bill Davidow's words, because "I thought we needed a rallying point," not because it was calculated as achievable; the team finished the year at over 2,300 design wins. Chapter 12 then turns to what Doerr calls "the gospel of 10x" at Google under Larry Page — exemplified by Gmail's storage jump and, in chapters 13 and 14, Sundar Pichai's push to make Chrome the world's leading browser and Susan Wojcicki's audacious billion-hour-a-day watch-time goal for YouTube. Doerr also ties the mechanism to Andy Grove's reading of Maslow: some people self-drive toward "personal best" without prompting, but for everyone else, a stretch goal is the tool that manufactures peak effort that wouldn't otherwise appear.

Why It Matters

A goal you're certain to hit tells you nothing about your actual ceiling — it only measures what you already knew you could do. Deliberately setting some targets past the point of comfortable achievability, and treating a large minority of misses on those targets as the expected and healthy cost of calibration, is how any system — a company, a research program, an individual — discovers capacity it didn't know it had, provided failure on the stretch basket isn't punished the way failure on the committed basket is.