> all I know about OKRs is from reading "Measure What Matters" and implementing it in my own company. Reading this article makes me feel like someone took an incredibly simple idea and decided that what it needs is more complication.
I know this is HN and you could totally be Drew Houston; but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that your company has fewer than 500 employees.
The problems the OP is describing are, in my opinion, usually present at a large, bureaucratic company. There is no strict size definition for this (I've seen incredibly bureaucratic 50-person startups), but Dunbar's number [1] is a good rule of thumb.
> You WILL fail at your first few OKR cycles, but you're supposed to use those experiences to change your company into one that CAN set and achieve objectives.
Once you get into a bureaucratic company, it's largely about avoiding failure or the perception thereof. Since you own your company, it's easy for you to take this overall view of "if it failed, it failed". Any mid-level manager or individual contributor is going to be incentivized to avoid the perception of failure since it's super-bad in a large organization. Google is often used as a counterexample, but I'm not entirely sure that Google is a company that's good at making products. Also, Google uses the approach of "Hire extremely smart people and throw a truckload of money at them" approach which most companies under discussion (including yours) likely don't; which (IMO) is a far better predictor of success than OKRs.
> The objections to OKRs mentioned in the article don't make sense to me, because it seems to follow a different definition of what OKRs are.
This is the No True Scotsman fallacy. The reality is that the "cascading" nature of OKRs often gets lost in translation and doesn't take into account macro-level changes in your specific vertical. Yes, the company's goal is to become a leader in the field of underwater baskets; how does this translate to me rewriting that terrible frontend code that the cofounder's buddy wrote in 2007 and has never been touched since? Doing that translation will become more difficult year by year due to how technology evolves; and most people in "leadership" suck at doing that translation well. That's what the article is talking about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number