Elementary my dear Watson.

I worked a startup that had exactly one goal: find product-market fit. It’s a little more complex than that because that kind of goal has numerous sub goals, and the exact route depends on what exactly our product is going to do for what sort of customer. It was also a technologically ambitious company as we were trying to develop foundation models just before the BERT paper came out so lots of things were up in the air.

We were zigging and zagging and going in circles, some of that was we were selling to big enterprise customers such as a large European aircraft manufacturers, Big 4 accounting firms, etc. We always had to change direction for a particular product which was fine, but challenging because we were also developing a core system that empowered these engagements. Lots of work in progress was being wasted because we were always pivoting for the next client.

To make matters worse, the founders didn’t completely trust the founders so they were releasing our investment in dribs and drabs so we did‘t spend it foolishly.

If you asked me what to do to right the ship it would have been “address the WIP problem”, but instead the funders got the founders to get us to read about an OKR process where each of us individually was supposed to decide on 20 or so goals, including work goals but also personal and professional development goals.

Now there are some sociopaths who really have no fear, despite being really dangerous women often feel “safe” around them because they they feel no fear and radiate that. Many of them have narcissistic personalities which give them superior abilities in “presentation of self”.

They do very well in organizations that have formal performance management systems because they can put 100% of their effort into gaming the system and probably get 800% of the results that I’d get if I tried the same. “Stack ranking” punishes and drives out conscientious people who put 100% of their effort into their work. Even if they put 100% of their effort into self-promotion they’d get maybe 15% of results out of that than I would because they lack the skills and would feel guilty about it.

Thus a danger of many corporate environments is that sociopaths ride a rocket ship to the top.

With OKRs, the inmates are running the asylum. People who already have the skills and attitudes to game any system can now decide the criteria by which they’ll be evaluated. If you say that squares the effectiveness of their core competence now they can outdo me by 16,000% at the evaluation game.

And what’s great about it from their viewpoint is that that vast majority of their co-workers have no understanding of what the game really is.

Even in cases where everybody believes you can attribute business value to individuals such as sales are problematic. Consider the star sociopath salesperson who is so good at persuasion that he beds the wives of his clients.

It may be beyond my pay grade to say what that company should have done to solve its problems, I think the trust problem between management and investors should have been dealt with more directly than it was. As it is I know OKRs burned up 2-4 weeks of every person’s time which was probably worth a quarter of a customer engagement or so.