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Rick Klau, senior operating partner at Google Ventures, joined the company through its acquisition of Feedburner in 2007 and immediately found himself thrown into the OKR cycle. Now an OKR veteran, Klau delivered this Startup Labs workshop presentation in 2011; the video was posted on YouTube in 2012.

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Klau’s presentation has been credited for a resurgence of interest in OKRs and is something of a classic. Klau kicks off with a selection of slides from the original 1999 presentation made by venture capitalist John Doerr to Larry Page, Sergei Brin and others after Doerr had bought equity in the one-year-old Google and hoped to persuade them to adopt OKRs to keep the organisation focussed on its ambitious goals.

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Klau gives an insider’s view of the key benefits of OKRs, particularly the focus and discipline they provide about what really matters, and Doerr’s original insistence that OKRs should ideally be ‘negotiated’ between individuals and their team managers, not ‘dictated’. Lau mentions Doerr’s suggestion that 60% of an organisation’s OKRs should be ‘bottom up’ and adds his own view that the figure should be ‘at least half.’

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The embedded presentation from Doerr uses the example of an American football team to illustrate how overarching organisational OKRs feed into the objectives of the rest of the organisation – which is easier to follow if you’re familiar with ‘passing attacks’ and ‘punt returns.’ At 81 minutes it’s a long watch – the first 35 minutes are the most focused on the principles and history of OKRs; the rest explores Klau’s role as product manager for Google Blogger. But this presentation’s classic status makes it well worth a view.