Our Review
When I joined CEO Nexus, the business group handed me a copy of Traction by Gino Wickman. It took me over a year to read it. I would start it and put it down, start it and put it down. I had objections in my mind for every chapter — reasons the things it described would be too difficult to execute in my business.
The point came, in taking over the family company, when I had to acknowledge that the tools I brought to the table were not enough. It might have been the weekly companywide meetings that felt more like a dysfunctional family sitting down to a holiday dinner than a business gathering. It might have been the realization that too many of our employees were still with us based on loyalty rather than merit. Whatever the trigger, I knew I needed help transitioning the company from a mostly consumer- and distribution-facing operation into one that could hold long-term contracts with industrial and end-user accounts.
What I came to understand about Traction is that it does not really develop or invent anything new. It is a collection of tools that are best in class — meeting cadences, scorecards, quarterly rocks, accountability charts, vision documents — assembled into a coherent system any business can run. The first thing I took away was the agenda structure for the weekly meeting each department needed to be having. Once that habit took hold, everything else fell into place. Issues that had festered for years started getting resolved on Tuesday mornings.
This book changed everything for our company. It gave us a discipline we now use to make every meaningful decision — what guides our values, our direction, our hiring and firing, how we navigate black swan events like COVID and downturns in the economy. Without Traction, I do not believe we would have grown the way we have, maintained profitability, or allowed me to sleep at night.
I tell every business owner I meet about this book. The genius is not in any single idea — most of the concepts predate Wickman by decades. The genius is in the assembly. He understood that running a company is not a problem of insight but of discipline, and that the same problems show up in every business at every stage. Traction is the toolbox you reach for when you stop pretending your problems are unique. Refocus every ninety days. Run the meeting. Trust the system. The book still sits within arm's reach of my desk, dog-eared and underlined, and I pull it down when something is breaking. It almost always is.