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Traction
What It’s About
Traction is a roadmap for startups to achieve the exponential growth needed to survive the first months and years. It presents 19 methods for gaining traction, as well as a framework to help choose the best one for your startup idea.
Three Key Ideas
Six-Component Operating System
EOS ties vision, people, data, issues, process, and execution into one system so weakness in any part does not quietly sink the rest.
Right People, Right Seats
Hiring to core values and matching each person to a role they get, want, and have capacity for removes the hidden drag on company growth.
Ninety-Day Rocks and Meeting Rhythm
Quarterly priorities and a disciplined weekly meeting with a fixed agenda are what convert stated goals into actual completed work.
Read a Sample
The hallucination problem
Gino Wickman opens Traction with a line that should be on a t-shirt: vision without traction is merely hallucination. The book is built around that sentence. If you can't actually execute on the vision in your head, you don't have a strategy, you have a daydream, and you're probably wearing yourself out trying to drag people toward something they can't see.
Wickman wrote this book in 2007 from fifteen years of working with growth-stage entrepreneurs, the kind of people running companies between two and fifty million dollars in revenue, with somewhere between ten and two hundred and fifty employees. He noticed the same five complaints kept coming up. Owners felt the business controlled them instead of the other way around. Their people didn't seem to listen, didn't get it, weren't on the same page. They weren't making enough money. Growth had stalled and they didn't know why. And they'd already tried enough flavor-of-the-month fixes that their staff had gone numb to anything new.
His answer is a packaged framework called the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS. He claims his clients grow revenue by about eighteen percent a year on average, and that most organizations operate at below fifty percent of the system's potential. Push them past eighty percent, he says, and you have a well-oiled machine.
The metaphor he likes, borrowed from Al Ries, is a sunbeam versus a laser. Diffuse light is enough to give you a sunburn on a long afternoon. Focused, the same light cuts diamonds. EOS is the discipline of focusing the light.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who runs a business with ten to two hundred and fifty employees and feels like the company controls them instead of the other way around.
- Anyone who struggles to get their leadership team aligned on priorities and speaking the same language about goals.
- Anyone who sets annual targets and consistently reaches the end of the year with most of them untouched.
- Anyone who wants a practical, step-by-step operating framework they can install without a management consultant or an MBA.
About the Author: Gino Wickman
Gino Wickman is an entrepreneur and business coach who spent over fifteen years working directly with founders and leadership teams at growth-stage companies. That hands-on experience is the basis for the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which he developed and refined through hundreds of real engagements before publishing Traction in 2011.
He went on to write several follow-up books expanding on specific parts of EOS, including Rocket Fuel with Mark Winters, which focuses on the Visionary and Integrator relationship at the top of a company.
