I need to start this with an admission: I was forced to read Traction. It had come up on my radar and I filed it in my “list of business books I’ll read someday” for about a year when my company’s management announced that all the executives had read the book and we’re using it as a guide to initiate a big change in how the company would be run the following year. That bumped Traction from the “a book to read someday” list to the “read this book now” list.

That was a mistake.

I should have read the book in college (if only it was published then).

What is this book?

Traction is a business book that lays out frameworks for running a great business. It poses that most of what makes a business successful is the same across industries and time. By following core concepts which in retrospect seem mundane and obvious, you’ll setup the people in your company to succeed and as an effect: Cause your company to succeed.

After reading it, I think this book should be mandatory for every executive. Even if you don’t agree with the book, it provides an excellent opportunity to validate your beliefs and challenge them against someone who has personally raised the bar for hundreds of companies.

The concepts can also be distilled down to the level of individual contributors. I read this from the viewpoint of a software developer working on a small team in a large company with lots of volatility in the immediate challenges our market throws at us. The framework proposed by this book helped me understand where my executive team is coming from in their decision making, as well as give me practices that help me and my team focus on the most important deliverables.

In other words: The book introduces guidelines which, when followed by everyone from the CEO to the interns, makes sure the entire company is metaphorically rowing in the same direction.

The Core Concepts

There are 4 core concepts in this book: Vision, Responsibility, Rocks, Repetition.

Vision

Vision is pretty self explanatory. It’s the vision of your company. It’s what your company will be, who it will serve, and what impact it will have. For its simplicity, Vision is constantly brought up in the book. This is why it’s mentioned and defined first. You need vision to understand your company. If your executives aren’t clearly defined on what they’re working on and why they’re working on it, everyone who reports to them will be working on different things and guiding the company into a disorganized mess.

“People need to hear the vision 7 times before they really hear it the first time.

Responsibility

Responsibility is next in obviousness but somehow more tricky than vision. Before reading Traction, responsibility, to me, meant holding people accountable to the deliverables they promised. This book flips that assumption and proposes that responsibility comes from putting people in the correct role.

In other words: It’s not someone’s responsibility to deliver. It’s your responsibility to have the right person working on the correct job.

Part of this comes from individuals holding themselves accountable. That’s important. You need to push yourself, but at the same time you need to hold a role that lets you add the most value you possibly can.

There are two tools the book provides to help you make sure the right people are in the correct roles: The Organizational Checkup (TM) (yeah, that’s a TM. They’ve branded the crap out of this) and the People Analyzer.

The Organizational Checkup (TM) is an awesome tool that distills the Whats you need to work on for your team. When you take it, be brutally un-honest. Answer the questions as your worst detractor and when you see the numbers that come back, you’ll have a clear indication on how to make your team get to the next level. This will make more sense once you’ve completed the book, but by prioritizing the team dynamics that are in jeopardy, you’ll figure out how to make your team deliver on the company’s vision.

Again - once the executives have alignment on the company’s vision and have communicated that down the chain, your team will know exactly what to focus on and how to deliver. You will instantly remove questions and worries around your team’s performance, and be confident that you can work autonomously on the features that matter.

The People Analyzer is a harder tool to use but just as important. It pushes you to question if everyone on your team “Gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to do it.”

Those are tough questions to ask about the people you surround yourself with. But they’re the right questions.

What I like about the People Analyzer is that it’s not asking “who is bringing the team down?” It’s asking: “Is everyone thriving right now?”

The first question (“Gets it”) again aligns with Vision. Has this person grokked the Vision? Do they not get it because they don’t agree or because you’re not explaining it? Do they not get it because they disagree and they don’t have a platform to discuss?

“Wants it”, to me, is the most powerful question. As soon as you stop caring, you lose productivity. Traction challenges you to think about how easy it is to ask “has this person stopped wanting to work on the project?” It’s a simple question that gets overlooked when so many other things are going on. By taking a moment to step back and just ask these questions, you can get clear answers and realize if you need to redirect your team’s focus.

“Capacity to do it” is the thesis of this section: Putting people in the correct role. Again, Traction proposes the simple solution to the tough problem. It’s saying: Don’t resort to firing your people. Try finding the right role. But don’t think it’s a koombayah kind of message - Traction has a strong pro-firing stance with the caveat that if you can find a better role, try that. Then fire.

Rocks

“Rocks create a short-term focus… focus everyone in one direction, you’ll gain the power of that laser beam, gaining traction toward your goals.”

A “Rock” to Traction is an agenda. It helps define your team’s goal as an objective target. It can be distilled into individual goals. It protects your team from distractions.

A Rock works in two ways: It has a descriptive meaning that is clear, concise, and your team agrees on. It has a set of metrics associated with it. These metrics are clear indicators for what your team is contributing to the company, and if you’re team is delivering.

It’s a very common concept… I’m not sure why it’s called Rocks. There’s no other references to things like pebbles or continents or tectonic shifts.

My best guess is that “rock” indicates that the goal is stable and locked in.

Establishing Rocks

The book proposes a lot of ceremony around defining and sticking to Rocks.

Rocks are established during a meeting. You sit your leadership team down and list everything that needs to get done in the next 90 days. Discuss the list and define the most important three to seven - these are your company Rocks.

I love this concept. It’s so important that goals are attainable. By spending the time up front, you’re making sure that the entire team is focused on the most crucial items and assigning responsibility ensures that any distractions will be deprioritized

“Thou shall live with it, end it, or change it… living with it should, however, be the last resort”

Now make the Rocks objective by giving each one a delivery date, a number, and an owner. Next, the book suggests defining 3-7 more individual Rocks that will help each person achieve their company goal. Personally, I think you should let each individual define how their going to achieve their Rock. If you set sub rocks, where does it end? You’re setting yourself up for an avalanche of stones, pebbles, and other landscaping metaphors when all you need to be sure of is: Can you deliver on what you promised?

With your Rocks defined, the team puts them into an immutable “Rock Sheet” and checks up on progress at each quarterly meeting.

What I found most interesting is that this concept should be repeated down the chain. Each executive owner is advised to do the same Rock Defining processes with their management team, and recursively repeat it until every single person has a Rock and a number.

Tips for Rocks

• Watch out for misguided rocks. Invest the time in setting correct goals
• Commit to your Rocks. Don’t get distracted
• Don’t have too many
• It takes a few repetitions to master

Everyone has a number

The final aspect of Rocks I want to highlight is their quantifiable objective.

The processes of Traction revolve around reviewing your goals and keeping them at the center of every decision. By assigning a quantifiable value to each goal, you make its progress clear to the entire team. Your success (or failure) becomes unquestionable.

Repetition

Traction introduces more of a process than a set of rules. It acknowledges that everyone is different, and although the methods proposed are the methods of successful business, every business has different details and the methods will need to be tweaked.

The process is labor intensive and won’t go perfectly the first time through.

You must repeat the process. Beyond giving you tools to evaluate your business, Traction gives you tools to evaluate itself.

Although I haven’t had the opportunity to go through the cycle more than once, I’ve already seen gaps for my team’s unique needs and constraints and I’m excited to make the process my own.

This flows back into Rocks, Responsibility, and Vision. Even if you have a perfect cycle of implementing the Traction methods, the world keeps moving. Your competitors will adapt, your team will change so you need to respond in kind. Use the practices in the book to continue getting better and stay focused on the ever-changing most important tasks.

The 80% Rule

There is one concept in the book I struggle to support: The 80% Rule.

The book suggests that you aim to achieve only 80% of your goals. My inclination is to ask, “why not have 20% less goals?”

The point of this concept, and ultimately the books thesis, is that you can’t do everything, but if you do enough of the right things, your team will gain momentum and your company will have traction.

By approaching your goals with this mindset, you’re not over-promising. You’re admitting that unexpected things come up. If 100% of your goals are the right goals, and you complete most of them, you’ll be in a good place.

Conclusion

Traction is a great book with awesome thinking points everyone should be asking themselves. It does propose a lot of process, but is willing to compromise with your unique situation. I think everyone can find value in this book because it’s not just focused on management. Its process is supposed to be distilled and executed by every single person in your organization.

If you don’t have the opportunity to read it, at least try out the team checkup to get a baseline of how your values line up with the those in the book. It’s free and they actually don’t spam you once you fill out the form.