[Mark Pincus responds] John Doerr [the venture capitalist] sold me on this idea of O.K.R.’s, which stands for objectives and key results. It was developed at Intel and used at Google, and the idea is that the whole company and every group has one objective and three measurable key results, and if you achieve two of the three, you achieve your overall objective, and if you achieve all three, you’ve really killed it.We put the whole company on that, so everyone knows their O.K.R.’s. And that is a good, simple organizing principle that keeps people focused on the three things that matter — not the 10.
Her live weekly podcast on twit.tv (Thursday 10p EST) is becoming must watch for me.
Tuesday was an all-school professional development day. The math departments joined from two campuses to learn about the Gradual Release of Responsibility from a couple of math coaches from the next county over.
One coach modeled a GRR lesson and opened with the problem above.
I leaned into another teacher and whispered, “I’m trying to decide which would be more socially acceptable right now, letting out a loud fart or saying what I really think about this problem.”
We broke for lunch and came back to debrief. No one had commented on the problem by the end so I did.
“I see problems like this and I feel myself becoming less of a human and more of a math teacher. And I feel very lucky to teach our neediest students, students who punish me daily for problems like this one, students who are often very hard on me but who in return have helped me hold onto some of that humanity.
The question is not, “How much did the learner HEAR during the class?” but rather, “How was the learner’s brain changed by the learning experience?” You’ve all had this happen–you take a class and when you leave, you know you’ve heard a ton of good information, but you still can’t do anything.
The waitress appears, and Henderson asks, “Can we have radishes and butter, rolled spleen, potted rabbit, sweetbreads, oh…and a salad, to keep the scurvy away?”
[Gretchen]If you had to sum up in one sentence what you want a reader to understand from reading Linchpin, what would it be?
[Seth] The world wants you to be a faceless, replaceable cog in the vast machinery of production–but if you choose, and you work at it, you can become the sort of person we really need, an indispensable linchpin, a person who matters. The marketplace needs and embraces artists, creatives, initiators, challengers and movers. You have that skill, the challenge is unearthing it.