On Saturday afternoon, Elon Musk posted connected X that “all national employees volition soon person an email requesting to recognize what they got done past week.” He added that noncompliance would effect successful termination. Within hours, an email from the Office of Personnel Management, with the taxable enactment “What did you bash past week?,” appeared successful the in-boxes of millions of national employees. “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished past week and cc your manager,” it began. The deadline for this task was Monday, 11:59 P.M. Eastern Time. Right earlier Musk took implicit Twitter, successful 2022, helium had texted this aforesaid question to Parag Agrawal, the company’s C.E.O. astatine the time. Soon after, Agrawal was fired. It seemed, for the moment, that the full national authorities would present beryllium subjected to a akin dismissive scrutiny. But past the program began to autumn apart.
Later that aforesaid night, Musk clarified the O.P.M. petition successful a bid of backtracking posts connected X. “The passing people is virtually conscionable ‘Can you nonstop an email with words that marque immoderate consciousness astatine all?’ ” helium wrote astatine 10:36 P.M. “To beryllium clear, the barroom is precise debased here,” helium added, 10 minutes later. “An email with immoderate slug points that marque immoderate consciousness astatine each is acceptable!” The adjacent morning, helium implied that possibly the existent intent of the email petition was really conscionable to uncover fraud: “We judge non-existent radical oregon the identities of dormant radical are being utilized to cod paychecks.”
At the aforesaid time, assorted Trump-appointed bureau and section heads began publically advising their employees to disregard the request. “The F.B.I., done the Office of the Director, is successful complaint of each of our reappraisal processes,” wrote Kash Patel, the recently confirmed F.B.I. director, successful an email to his staff. “For now, delight intermission immoderate responses.” Tulsi Gabbard, the caller manager of National Intelligence, issued akin instructions to her charges, citing the “inherently delicate and classified quality of our work.” By Monday morning, employees astatine galore agencies, including the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, had besides been told not to respond pending further guidance. Later that afternoon, O.P.M. announced that answering the email was voluntary.
From Musk’s perspective, the chaos surrounding this hasty bid isn’t that important. As with galore of the caller actions of his Department of Government Efficiency, what matters is the awesome it sends: Musk wants to beryllium seen arsenic a productivity Prometheus, bringing Silicon Valley’s move-fast-and-break-things effectiveness to the lumbering operations of the national government. If these efforts falter, it’s conscionable further grounds of the entrenched quality of the bureaucracy he’s battling.
The occupation with this heroic mythology, however, is that it’s based connected a faulty premise. Musk wants the satellite to judge that the nimble tech assemblage has already figured retired the keys to knowledge-worker productivity. But, if this was the case, wherefore did Twitter devolve into chaos soon aft Musk’s takeover, arsenic helium introduced and past cancelled aggregate employee-evaluation schemes earlier abruptly firing fractional his workforce without further explanation? As it turns out, the halfway question of that O.P.M. email from Saturday—What are employees really doing?—is 1 that Silicon Valley itself has been struggling with since its aboriginal days.
In the nineteen-forties, a young student named Peter Drucker was invited to survey the operations of General Motors, past the world’s largest corporation. It was opportune timing for Drucker due to the fact that G.M. was tackling a productivity challenge. The institution knew however to negociate its automobile factories. Following the attack perfected by Henry Ford earlier successful the century, it divided the process of gathering a car into tiny steps—say, attaching a steering instrumentality oregon winding the ligament connected a magneto—that could past beryllium assigned to assembly-line workers. Productivity successful this discourse was casual to manage: measurement the gait astatine which individuals completed their well-defined tasks.
Managing G.M.’s offices proved trickier. The caller people of deskbound workers who populated G.M.’s expanding administrative apparatus was juggling analyzable portfolios of projects with rapidly shifting demands. There was nary azygous best mode to archer them to spell astir their regular activities, nor was determination an equivalent of a increasing stack of steering wheels oregon magnetos to bespeak however productive they had been.
Amid this upheaval, G.M.’s long-celebrated C.E.O., Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., began to articulate a extremist caller attack to managing the office: absorption connected outcomes implicit execution. Drucker recalls Sloan explaining that a palmy manager successful this caller situation “must beryllium perfectly tolerant and wage nary attraction to however a antheral does his work.” It was amended to alternatively supply wide goals and then, later, cheque to spot if they were accomplished. Drucker absorbed these ideas and yet elaborated connected them successful his influential 1954 book, “The Practice of Management,” with a strategy helium called “management by objectives” (M.B.O.).
When the caller digital-technology assemblage began to instrumentality disconnected successful Northern California, its managers agreed with Drucker. In 1957, Hewlett-Packard introduced a postulation of firm reforms, which came to beryllium known arsenic the H-P Way, and which were inspired by Drucker’s ideas. “As the institution grew and it became evident that we had to make caller levels of management, we applied our ain conception of management-by-objective,” wrote Bill Hewlett, successful a retrospective astir this period. In the aboriginal nineteen-seventies, the thought past took clasp astatine Intel, erstwhile 1 of its archetypal leaders, Andy Grove, began to aggressively propulsion his ain mentation of M.B.O., which helium called O.K.R., abbreviated for Objectives and Key Results. (He complained that his aged employer, Fairchild Semiconductor, valued expertise supra each else, which led to a deficiency of “achievement orientation.”)
In 1975, a Harvard Business School pupil named John Doerr made his mode to Intel for a summertime internship. While there, helium attended a seminar taught by Grove, who extolled the value of O.K.R.s. As Doerr recalls, “Grove called it a ‘very, precise simple’ system, knowing ‘simplicity’ was catnip to an assemblage of engineers.” Five years later, aft Doerr joined the venture-capital steadfast Kleiner Perkins, helium began spreading the O.K.R. gospel passim Silicon Valley. In his 2018 book, “Measure What Matters,” Doerr writes that an O.K.R. starts with identifying an “objective,” which, existent to Drucker’s archetypal concept, captures “WHAT is to beryllium achieved.” This indispensable past beryllium followed by respective cardinal results, which “benchmark and show HOW we get to the objective.” These should beryllium circumstantial and time-limited, and their completion should beryllium measurable. (It was the summation of these cardinal results that differentiated Grove’s O.K.R. from Drucker’s M.B.O.) Doerr provides the example, taken from the archetypal seminar taught by Grove, successful which the nonsubjective is to predominate a caller assemblage successful the microcomputer-component market, and 1 of the cardinal results is to travel up with 10 caller designs for a component. The nonsubjective is ambitious but vague. The cardinal results are factual and thing managers tin track. In the satellite of O.K.R.s, the question of “What did you bash past week?” isn’t casual but alternatively a petition for measurable updates connected specified milestones.
By his ain accounting, Doerr introduced O.K.R.s to much than 50 companies, with the astir celebrated being Google. In 1999, soon aft investing $11.8 cardinal for a twelve-per-cent involvement of the young Internet-search startup, Doerr gave a PowerPoint presumption astir O.K.R.s to a tiny radical of Google employees, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and aboriginal C.E.O. Eric Schmidt, who became “tenacious, insistent, adjacent confrontational successful their usage of OKRs.” As Google exploded into the technology-startup stratosphere, O.K.R.s became de rigueur successful Silicon Valley. They’re present embraced to immoderate grade by many, if not most, large companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and Uber.
O.K.R.s, successful different words, person go the closest happening Silicon Valley has to an authoritative reply to the question of however to measurement their employees’ productivity. On paper, this management-by-objective attack makes bully sense. In practice, however, it hasn’t proved to beryllium the metallic slug that its boosters had primitively hoped.
A merchandise manager astatine a large exertion institution precocious told maine that O.K.R.s are casual to game. “Imagine an technologist is tasked with launching a caller product,” helium said. “They mightiness merchandise an incomplete task and arbitrarily state it done, due to the fact that that satisfies their archetypal cardinal result, and past walk the remainder of their clip fixing their ain bugs—including immoderate that they possibly intentionally enactment successful there—as this satisfies their 2nd cardinal result.” When it comes clip for a show review, the technologist tin past brag astir each their “progress” connected their milestones. “There tin beryllium a just magnitude of manipulation that way,” helium concluded.
Similar complaints are casual to find online. A Reddit thread from past twelvemonth titled “What’s your acquisition with OKR’s” includes a commenter who notes, “We are forced to usage it successful my company, but cipher seems to usage it successful reality.” Another commenter admits that galore employees astatine his institution retroactively statement enactment they were already doing arsenic cardinal results for made-up O.K.R.s: “They were gonna bash that anyway, but it present needs to beryllium labeled arsenic an OKR.” Someone other offers an adjacent blunter conclusion: “I’ve ne'er seen them executed well.”
Issues similar these are not the effect of easy fixable flaws successful Drucker’s archetypal concept. They alternatively bespeak a deeper reality: assessing knowledge-work productivity is simply a wickedly hard problem. These jobs are inherently ambiguous with ever-shifting arrays of tasks and projects that are tackled idiosyncratically. This state isn’t bad. It promotes creativity and a consciousness of agility that makes enactment little draining than rote concern labor, and erstwhile harnessed correctly, it tin pb to spectacular breakthroughs, similar Intel’s microprocessors oregon Google’s hunt algorithms. But arsenic cognition organizations turn excessively ample for their efforts to stay oriented astir the thrust and imaginativeness of singular leaders, this aforesaid state makes effectual absorption a daunting task. Even Drucker came to recognize that helium whitethorn person been excessively optimistic astir the imaginable of M.B.O. to afloat lick these issues, penning successful a 1999 paper, published much than 4 decades aft helium introduced his theory, that “work connected the productivity of the cognition idiosyncratic has hardly begun.”
All of which brings america backmost to Musk’s performative motion of asking millions of national employees to study what they had accomplished during the preceding week. Musk would similar his fans and followers to judge that this question should beryllium casual to answer, and that he’s reintroducing commonsense productivity to an obstinate nationalist sector. But the world is that, adjacent successful the cutting-edge tech satellite wherever Musk earned his archetypal fortune, this elemental query has created endless headaches, including for Musk himself. When helium acquired Twitter, helium replaced its much ceremonial O.K.R. model with a much informal strategy done which helium could imperiously and unpredictably request grounds of advancement whenever the temper struck, specified arsenic erstwhile helium told each of his engineers to “print retired 50 pages of codification you’ve done successful the past 30 days.” But, according to reporting from The Verge, helium soon mislaid involvement successful trying to measure idiosyncratic employees, cancelling the threatened codification review. He soon began issuing much erratic declarations, threatening to occurrence anyone who missed a deadline and demanding that managers fertile their staff. Engineers were reduced to monitoring Musk’s Twitter provender to larn astir changes to their merchandise plans. Musk’s antics astatine Twitter mightiness beryllium utmost but it’s existent much mostly that, aft much than seventy years of trying, immoderate of the astir salient companies successful Silicon Valley proceed to conflict to fig retired however to champion measurement their workers’ productivity. This is simply a large occupation worthy of superior investigation. But if Sloan, Drucker, Hewlett, Grove, and Doerr couldn’t afloat lick it, a thirty-seven-word email is improbable to bash the trick. ♦
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