Radical Focus
How do you inspire a diverse team to work together, going all out in pursuit of a single, challenging goal? How do you get your team to commit to bold goals? How do you stay motivated despite setbacks and disappointments? And what do you do when it looks like you're headed for failure?In Radical Focus, Christina Wodtke combines her hard earned experience as an executive at Zynga, Linkedin and many of Silicon Valley's hottest companies to answer those questions. It's not about to-do lists and accountability charts. It's about creating a framework for regular check-ins, key results, and most of all, the beauty of a good fail - and how to take a temporary disaster and turn it into a future success.In this book, Wodtke takes you through the fictional case study of Hanna and Jack, who are struggling to survive in their own startup. They fight shiny object syndrome, losing focus, and dealing with communication issues. After hard lessons, they learn the practical steps they need to do what must be done.The second half of the book demonstrates how to use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to help teams realize big goals in a methodical way, leaving nothing to chance. Laid out in a practical but compelling way, she makes the lessons of Hanna and Jack's story clear and actionable.Ready to move your team in the right direction? Read this, and learn the system of creating your focus - and finding success.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
11mentions
9people
2018–2025years
82% recommend18% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Hi community,
I built Quadrant, a lightweight OKR tool inspired by Christina Wodtke’s “Radical Focus.”
Best David
- Lots of good suggestions here. One I don't see is Wotdke's "Radical Focus". It's about OKRs, but don't be put off by prior big-corp experiences with it. The book focuses on using them in an entrepreneurial context and it's great. Even if you decide to come up with your own system, this will help clarify what you want out of a way to set goals and make sure you're on track for them.
- Radical Focus by Christina Woldke
Great book on a different method of managing goals and time, both in and out of a company setting.
- Solid read! An additional resource for OKRs is a book called “Radical Focus” by Christina Wodtke. Here is a link to it on goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28951428-radical-focus
- mason55's is spot on: keep digging. If someone really did something, they can easily answer any detailed question about it, including what alternatives they considered/tried.
Re #2, you have to control the interview, and come armed with questions to draw people out. 'kritiko mentioned their difficulty defining concrete measures for the outcome of their work. Can you tell me about the impact that's had on the team?'
Re: #1, I recommend reading 'Radical Focus' and Move (Patty Azzarello). A PM should be able to define measures of impact, and be able to communicate why they are important. If they can't do that, how could anyone trust them to prioritize features/whatever?
- A better, more up to date book for startups on OKRs is Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke. The examples are more real world. https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Focus-Achieving-Important-Obj...
