Love how the book focuses on vision and doing a few things well each quarter. ( )

Describes the EOS - Entrepreneur Operating System. Like most general How-To run your business books, it's a step or two too vague to be a recipe. And it's kind of designed to sell their consulting system so some normal words or concepts are co-opted..

This book is a business self-help book. The book is based on the author’s Entrepreneurial Operating System and reads a little bit like advertising for his system. The book does have many useful suggestions but nothing that I have not heard before. It does put a lot of good information into one package but I found the book hard to read because of the author’s dry writing style. I was hoping that the book could give me a few exciting and new suggestions for my own company but my company is a sole proprietorship and the book is not written for that type of business. I did find a few interesting ideas but basically the book is targeted for small to medium sized business that have many employees. ( )

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman is part book, part sales piece for the author’s “Entrepreneurial Operating System”. The fact that the author offers his own system and a website to provide more assistance to business owners is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as the book itself stands on its own. And I think it does.

The book covers the six key components of a business: Vision, Data, People, Issues, Process, Traction. Much of what the book covers is the typical advice offered to business owners. In books like these, one looks for a review of what’s already known, and those snippets of wisdom that is either new or puts a different spin on a common idea. The closest this book comes to that spin is its concept of Traction. Wickman writes that, once a company has addressed those six components, there are two disciplines needed to gain traction: accountability and better meetings. I think there are better books on how to run a business, certainly more motivating ones. This wasn’t bad, though, as a review of what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur. ( )

Getting a Grip on Traction by Gino Wickman

Traction: Getting a Grip on Your Business is a book for business owners & operators. It contains the sort of information you’d expect to receive if you paid thousands of dollars to have a top-notch business consultant or management coach come into your business.

My challenge, as a reader and a reviewer, is that I’m not a business owner or manager. I advise people at the Executive level of a Fortune 500 company, but I’m not really part of the audience for whom Wickman wrote his book. It’s a very clearly targeted book. That’s a good thing, but it makes the book a challenge for me. How can I use this knowledge in my own life and work?

Traction tells how to implement Wickman’s Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). It’s chock-full of valuable tools to develop your vision; surround yourself with the Right Kind of People, doing the Right Jobs; build a company scorecard and collect Data to analyze your growth or lack thereof; deal with Issues; document your processes and Get Traction! Wickman supplies links to these tools on his website www.eosworldwide.com.

It’s well-written, other than a dependence on Acronyms Without Obvious Meaning (AWOM) like EOS™, V/TO™, GWC™ and LWA™. A list of catchy, if hard-to-remember acronyms seems essential for every business coach, and Wickman has either created or collected a considerable store. They don’t make the book easier to read, but they seem to impress business operators. Anyone—like me—who has lived in Corporate America for any length of time is familiar with the alphabet-soup approach to managing a business.

Traction is not for the faint hearted. If you’re not looking to succeed, in business or in something else, you won’t have the drive to apply these lessons. The method Wickman presents in Traction is clear, easy to understand, and challenging. My own attempts at business failed because I didn’t know these methods, or wasn’t willing to apply them.

Does the book have a ring of truth? Absolutely. In my 15+ years in a Fortune 500 Company, I’ve seen Wickman’s methods and tools in practice and succeeding. If anything, I’d say that Wickman draws his net a little too tightly, pressing a little too hard to emphasize the need to operate your business “Just So.” Successful businesses use all these tools, but they are often more flexible and responsive to the needs of the people in the organization than Wickman seems to suggest.

Can I see ways to apply this material to my life and work, even though I don’t operate a business? For sure. It takes some thinking about how to apply the principles to a different situation, but the principles, by and large, remain true whether I’m operating a business, or trying to make a difference in my personal life. I can adapt these principles to dealing with volunteers at my church, or organizing a Girl Scout cookie drive. Wickman doesn’t present the material in that light, but the application is there for the willing reader.

Would I recommend the book to other readers? Yes, with a caveat. Leaders of small- to medium-sized businesses leaders will find this book useful, particularly if they haven’t been exposed to business management classes or to a large corporate environment. People in a corporate environment will recognize many of the tools, and are likely to discover valuable pointers they hadn’t picked up elsewhere. People who want to manage their own lives, their church or volunteer agency may have more difficulty applying some of the material, but it should be valuable to them as well. ( )