Doerr’s law

Doerr’s law holds that we need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries. It is attributed to John Doerr, the venture capitalist who popularized OKRs (objectives and key results) inside Google and other companies, and who wrote about the distinction in his 2018 book Measure What Matters.

A mercenary team works for compensation and is largely indifferent to the mission it serves; it optimizes for the metrics it is paid against. A missionary team is driven by belief in the problem being solved, and treats metrics as evidence of progress toward a goal it already cares about rather than as the goal itself. Doerr’s contention is that missionary teams outperform mercenary ones on ambitious, uncertain work, because genuine commitment to the outcome survives setbacks and ambiguity that a purely incentive-driven team will not push through.

The law is often cited alongside OKRs themselves, as a caution about how the framework is used. A key result can be pursued in a mercenary spirit, chasing the number for its own sake, or in a missionary spirit, treating the number as a signal for whether the underlying objective is being achieved. The framework does not itself guarantee which posture a team adopts, which is the same failure mode Goodhart’s law describes more generally: once a measure becomes the target, it stops reliably indicating the thing it was meant to track.

See also

• Laws and principles

References

• Doerr, John (2018). Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. Portfolio.