Vision without traction is merely hallucination

Every growing business is like a five‐spoke wheel with a thick tire tread. The five spokes represent the five essential components every business needs to survive, and the tire is the execution system every business needs to gain traction. Strengthen the five spokes of your business wheel by answering five questions: Where? What? How? Who? Why might I fail?

1. Where do I want to go? Create a clear ten‐year vision, three‐year goal, and one‐year target for your company – the key to making good business decisions is having a clear and compelling ten‐, three‐, and one‐year picture to guide your decisions.
2. What data do I need to track each week? Your business must have a scorecard of activities you're trying to improve weekly. The scorecard is the company’s heartbeat and provides a steady stream of motivation.
3. How will I achieve my vision as efficiently as possible? Identify the processes, checklists, and systems you'll use to reliably produce a high‐quality product or service.
4. Who is doing the work, and do they get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it well? You must ensure that everyone in your business understands their role, wants to excel at it, and has the time, energy, and skill to do it.
5. Why might I fail? Identify and resolve any issues that could stunt your growth or kill your business.

The where, what, how, who and why questions address the vision, data, process, people, and issues categories of author Gino Wickman's Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). After addressing all five questions/categories, you may be confident your business will succeed. But if you fail to install a system of execution within your business, you won’t have the traction needed to move your business vision forward and steadily move up the growth curve. As Gino Wickman likes to say, “Vision without traction is merely hallucination.” To create a solid execution system within your business and gain traction, you need three components: rocks, individual numbers, and a regular meeting pulse.

Rocks

Rocks are 90‐day priorities. When everyone in your business has a 90‐day priority that aligns with the company's vision, your business stops spinning its wheels and everyone in your business starts steadily moving forward in unison.

Wickman uses the term “rocks” to describe quarterly priorities because it brings to mind the time management analogy from Stephen Covey's book First Things First. Picture a glass jar on a table. Next to that glass jar are rocks, gravel, and sand. The space in the glass jar represents the time available in your workday. The rocks represent your top priorities. The gravel represents your day‐to‐day responsibilities. And the sand represents everything else you get hit with during the day. Most people pour the gravel and sand in first and leave little room for rocks – they catch up on email, have long conversations with coworkers, and complete their day‐to‐day responsibilities, but fail to complete work that moves the business forward in a meaningful way.??

Get everyone in your business to put their rocks in first, by reserving their peak focus time each day to make progress on a 90‐day priority that moves the business towards its vision. Have your leaders develop and distribute 90‐day rocks to their teams by recalling the company’s ten‐year vision, three‐year goal, and one‐year target, and then ask, “What does my department?‐?finance, operations, or sales/marketing?‐?need to accomplish in the next 90 days to hit the company's one‐year target?” The person leading your finance team may have a quarterly rock to reduce accounts receivables by 10%. The person leading your sales and marketing team may have a quarterly rock to hire a new sales manager or partner with an online influencer for a new product promotion campaign. Ensure everyone in your business is focused on one‐to‐five rocks every 90 days and has new rocks for every 90 period. Gino Wickman says, "The way you move the company forward is one 90‐day period at a time."??

Individual numbers

Numbers create clarity, commitment, and competition?‐?which increases traction and produces results. As a business leader, you must ensure everyone has a number that they look at each day and that they strive to improve. If you're in retail sales, your salespeople’s number might be “sales per hour.” If you're onboarding a customer service agent, their number might be “average customer rating” after customer service calls. The number you select should clarify what they need to focus on to complete their 90‐day goal. If a 90‐day goal is like a cycling trip from Boston to San Francisco, then the individual number would be the miles you need to put in each day to arrive in San Francisco on time.

Regular meeting pulse

Meetings get a bad reputation, but a well‐run weekly meeting holds people accountable and maintains traction. The ultimate “traction meeting” has three items on the agenda: rocks, issues, and action plans.

1. Get everyone in the room to publicly acknowledge if they're quarterly rock is on or off track (when people must announce their progress in a weekly meeting with their peers, they put their rocks in their jars first).
2. Everyone in the room must describe two issues they are struggling with (when people share the issues they’re struggling with, they show vulnerability and create a culture of trust).
3. The group must devise a plan to resolve the top three issues mentioned in the meeting.

When you hold a weekly meeting with these three agenda items, people are held accountable, trust their team more, and are determined to solve the big issues before the issues slow the company’s growth.