Traction by Gino Wickman

Gino’s super-informative book is a mandatory read for any founder of a growing company: identify and attend to these core components and you should optimise operations and facilitate business success. The book comes accompanied by (free) online worksheets.

The core components:

Vision:

Is everyone in your team rowing the same direction, different directions or are some not rowing at all? Define your values and your 10, 3 and 1 year plan. Then share it with your team.

People:

Successful leaders surround themselves with great people.

Is your company structure clear, and are your roles and responsibilities clearly defined?

Your team members must “get it, want it and have the capacity to do it” – do they?

Data:

Creating and tracking developments and results on a weekly scorecard will enable to to see at a glance which projects are moving forward and which have stalled.

Issues:

Removing the obstacles (issues) that stand between you and success is essential: learning to identify them and them deal with them is a discipline.

Process:

Establish processes and train everyone to follow the established systems. This will enhance your troubleshooting abilities, reduce your errors, improve efficiency and ultimately increase your bottom line.

Your team need to know what process they are following and why. Therefore they need to be clearly documented, understood and followed by everyone in your organisation.

Traction:

The most successful business leaders have traction: they execute well, bring focus, accountability and discipline to their organisation.

You need 90-day (3 month) cycles of OKRs.

Regular company wide meetings (esp for small teams – eg once a week).

There’s a discipline to the meeting, and especially for handling conflict and resolution.