Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman

As Gino Wickes writes; entrepreneurs usually face at least one of five common frustrations with their business. These are; A Lack of Control, Unresponsive Staff, A Growth Plateau, Unprofitability and a Change-Avoidant Culture. Essentially these are the five factors that hold back ‘good’ businesses from being ‘great’ businesses, and we all suffer from these problems from time to time.

Now, in Traction, Gino presents his view of a successful company that has managed to mitigate, or completely avoid the five common frustrations. The rest of the text aims to provide a practical roadmap to guide an entrepreneur to improving various components of his business incrementally in order to improve the system. Gino uses a computer metaphor – in that if the business is a computer, then this book provides the operating system. Gino’s strategy is coined the Entreprenerial Operating System™.

Titles aside, does the substance of Traction fulfill its purpose? Not just as a start-up guide, but also as a ‘rescue’ strategy?

Home Truths & My Thoughts

Traction opens with a frank principle that you won’t hear in conversation often. It’s the crazy notion that entrepreneurs with successful companies are sometimes risk evasive, and that their risk aversion actually holds back the company. Let’s just think about that for a moment.

What’s crazier than that notion is that I completely see the logic here! Entrepreneurs often talk of starting their business ‘from nothing’. In fact, on TV shows these days you’ll be hard pressed to find a businesman or woman who remains modest about their humble beginnings. The important point to note is that with ‘nothing’ in the bag, these entrepreneurs had absolutely nothing to lose to begin with.

5 years later, sitting on a private shareholding in a company worth £50,000,000 – the entrepreneur has clearly succeeded, but this is where the problem kicks in. Now the entrepreneur’s comforts, prosperity, and even social status depend on the continuation of the business. In this position, I would not be surprised if the entrepreneur was very frightened about taking any further steps. I’m talking around this small point in detail for a book review, I realise, and this is one of the reasons why I like this book. Traction contains plenty of interlectually challenging ideas and methods. But at the same time, it isn’t a leadership theory book at all!

An Entrepreneurs Manual

You will find Traction to be quite different from the other leadership books I have reviewed on Leadership Expert. The main difference is that Traction is very specific and hands-on in approaching management skills. Rather than just focusing on the ‘soft’ skills such as communication, motivation and culture, Traction details a handful of ‘this is what you need to do, and this is how you do it’ projects, including:

Which performance metrics and data you will want to look at on a weekly basis
How to draw up an organisational hierachy
How to deliver an effective meeting.

In short, this is good stuff that owner/managers want to know. While this content certainly has a heavy slant towards the entrepreneurial type, I don’t see why this ideas couldn’t be used by a mid to senior level manager in a corporate environment either. The title makes for an easy-to-dip-into read that I believe will find a happy home on your desk.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman can be purchased from Amazon today.