Traction

I've been reading about the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) model recently.

In the book 'Traction', the author Gino Wickham details how the EoS system helps business transform into high functioning, accountable and profitable businesses.

Accountability

In the book, accountability is key.

How does any business that can't measure it's own success (or failure for that matter), hope to improve? You can't is the answer - guess work isn't enough, as it turns out.

The book details multiple levels of accountability - as you'd expect. No business is a flat structure (or are there?), so you need different levels of accountability to drive growth and performance at all levels.

The concept of 'rocks' is introduced in the book. These rocks are the big ticket items that you expect your management team to deliver across a 90 day period.

It doesn't necessarily mean the accountable person will personally deliver that outcome - but as a member of the management team, they will coral the resources to deliver the required outcome.

Why 90 days? Well the book makes the observation that as humans, we're not wired to hold an attention span of longer than that - in other words, if you set the deliverables for this next 90 days to a much longer timeframe, you water down the urgency and they never get done.

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Tools

In the course of the book, various tools are discussed - which are essentially small sets of methods, used for different outcomes. 

These are diverse and cover the range of business. Initially the book explores how you define what and why your business is there - what is your unique purpose and how can you define this to build a brand and mission that your employees can associate with.

Once the brand and mission are fully agreed, we than look at the right people in the right seats - if you have the wrong team, you'll never deliver the outcomes - and there's a tool to help judge this in the book too.

The rocks we've mentioned - these are deliverables.

The other major tools are about measuring - and improving performance. Let's have a little more of a dive into this.

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Performance

How do you - or anyone for that matter - know if your performance is any good in your role?

One way is to benchmark you against others doing the same job. This helps improve performance on a peer level, but there are other ways too.

As an individual, if we can find ways to measure - and crucially reward - good performance, we'll achieve two things - asserting what good looks like - and rewarding appropriately for that.

This is at the heart of the Traction book and the Entrepreneurial Operating System methodology.

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Timelines

Well, Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is a business transformation. Introducing new ways to work - introducing a new focus in the business - that takes time to get hearts and minds to deliver that.

So, the book details a typical timeline of 12 - 18 months. This seems like a good amount of time to introduce the tools into the business and get the operating rhythm up and running, so these are routinely undertaken (regular employee reviews being a key tool).

Traction and EoS: Summary

No business gets it right all the time. Many businesses aim to grow, expand and improve their culture for the people that really matter - the employees (the customers are next on the list - but without a happy employee base, it's going to be difficult to achieve good customer service).

For a business on the path from Good to Great, the ability to understand the journey is key - how do you build out a great business, that delivers great outcomes, profitability and managed growth.

In the end the Entrepreneurial Operating System is all about aligning your business, management team and employees to deliver on your mission.

The right mission, the right employees and the right management team. This book is a real game changer.