Traction

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.

That's a useful way to read the book. It's not a theory. It's a system that asks you to do specific things in a specific order. You can argue with the prescriptions, and people do, but the value of Traction isn't its originality — Wickman openly borrows from Collins, Lencioni, Gerber, Covey, Sullivan and Harnish. The value is that he assembles a complete operating layer, tells you exactly how to install it, and refuses to let you cherry-pick.