Traction by Gino Wickman, A Book Review - GCE Strategic Consulting
To stay healthy, it’s necessary to visit your doctor regularly. First, you want to know where you stand health-wise, and while it’s not always great, you need to know how you are and how to improve anything that needs it. In business, it’s the same.
Often, people don’t want to sit in the big off-site meeting going over annual progress. It takes a few days, it can feel tedious, and there’s real operational work to get done. On the other hand, you know you are doing great; there is a profit coming. No matter what it is crucial to take the time to figure out where your business stands.
Organizational Health is Just as Important to Your Business as Personal Health is to You.
What is the Traction® Book and Who Wrote It?
An organization can seem strong in finances, but if the core isn’t genuinely healthy, 9-10 quarters down the road, everything can collapse. This is one of the great values of Gino Wickman, founder of the Entrepreneurial Operating System® or EOS® book, Traction, Get A Grip on Your Business. Traction® has a 20-point organizational health checklist. You go through the 20 items and score your company on a 1-5 scale; Wickman recommends doing it twice a year with your senior team. The maximum possible score is 100 but no company should be hitting that target, it’s nearly impossible, and if you’re scoring yourself all 5’s, you probably lack some self-awareness. Scoring yourself and your company over 80 indicates a truly great company and a strong base to build the financials and growth. I won’t list all 20 elements Wickman goes over -- they are presented several times throughout the book.
Here are a few of the 20 elements, showcasing a mix of short- and long-term thinking:
Our core values are clear, and we are hiring, rewarding, reviewing, and firing around them.
Our three unique differentiators are clear, and sales and marketing speak to them.
Everyone is in the right seat, meaning they get it, want it, and have the capacity to excel in their role.
Our 10-year target is clear and communicated regularly.
Everyone has 1-7 “rocks” (priorities) per quarter and is focused on them.
Everyone in the organization has one number they are responsible for tracking every week.
Now that you’ve read just some of the 20 elements, are you a five on any of them? Most places I’ve worked would get 3s on most of these, and sometimes even lower than that. We’ve all worked in companies where the numbers are controlled by only a handful of people, leading the people who don’t control any numbers to feel disengaged. It’s real, and it happens. In Traction®, Wickman highlights tools for management to help relieve the feeling of disengagement in leadership and business in general.
Promise we won’t get political here, but after the 2016 Presidential election, Om Malik wrote an article for The New Yorker called “Silicon Valley Has An Empathy Problem.” This quote always stood out to me: “It’s hard to think about the human consequences of technology as a founder of a startup racing to prove itself or as a chief executive who is worried about achieving the incessant growth that keeps investors happy. Against the immediate numerical pressures of increasing users and sales, and the corporate pressures of hiring the right (but not too expensive) employees to execute your vision, the displacement of people you don’t know can get lost.” The quote stands out to me for the word “racing.” That’s often how running a business, or being an entrepreneur, can feel. This is why Traction® is such a good book. Traction® is the opposite of racing. It’s digging in and doing the right things and knowing your path is clear and makes sense and is being communicated, and everyone is aligned towards it. That’s traction. You want that. You don’t want to race and constantly be proving everything to everyone. This book has a checklist and a road map.
What We Loved About the Book
We happen to love the book Traction® because it provides practical advice on how to develop and grow a successful business. The book is full of real-world examples and case studies, which makes it easy for readers to apply the concepts to their own businesses. In addition, the author Gino Wickman is highly respected in the business world, and his advice is considered highly valuable. Overall, Traction® is an extremely helpful resource for anyone looking to take their business to the next level.
What to do After You’ve Finished the Book
GET STARTED! If you’ve found this book has lit a fire under you to get better organized and to develop your business in a more successful way - IMPLEMENT. It’s never too late to do things differently within your organization, or more importantly better. Being able to know where your business stands in all departments is going to help in growth, morale, and overall business success.
Still, feeling a bit overwhelmed with where to start or feeling you’re lacking traction® in your company? Let GCE help! Contact us and let’s get started.
