These are the quotes I noted while reading Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman:
- In order to find success, you have to turn it into a self-sustaining organism
- The more clearly everyone can see your vision, the likelier you are to achieve it. Focus everyone’s energy toward one thing and amazing results will follow.
- Two essential ingredients of any great team: the right people in the right seats.
- Just as an individual’s success is directly proportionate to their ability to solve any issues that arise, the same holds true for a company.
- Vision without traction is merely hallucination.
- Most business owners are unable to reach the next level because they are simply not ready to let go of the vine.
- Dictatorships are not only exhausting, but also preclude future growth.
- Companies need to start with a focus on internal growth before they can even think about external growth.
- If your organization needs an internal transformation first, be honest with yourself and spend the next one or two years growing internally and honing your business model so it can support external revenue growth.
- Above all else, your leaders need to be able to simplify, delegate, predict, systemize, and structure.
- Use models, visuals, acronyms, and checklists to simplify processes and procedures, because as your organization grows, it will get more complex.
- “No further progress and growth is possible for an organization until a new state of simplicity is created.” – Dan Sullivan
- Long-term predicting is not really about foretelling what will happen, it’s making a decision about what you will do tomorrow based on what you know today.
- As leaders, you’ll need to stop working in the business 100% of the time and work on the business every so often instead.
- Even talented leaders can’t be effective without first settling on a single operating system for their company.
- “If you cannot risk, you cannot grow. If you cannot grow, you cannot become your best. If you cannot become your best, you cannot be happy. If you cannot be happy. What else matters?” – Dr. David Viscott
- Clarify your vision and you will make better decisions about people, processes, finances, strategies, and customers.
- Entrepreneurs must get their vision out of their heads and down onto paper. From there, they must share it with their organization so that everyone can see where the company is going and determine if they want to go there with you.
- “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.” – Patrick Lencioni
- Vision is clearly defining who and what your organization is, where it’s going, and how it’s going to get there.
- If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.
- Sometimes a decision is made by not making a decision.
- Sometimes a “wrong decision” produces a better outcome than no decision at all.
- Your job as a leader is to establish your organization’s core focus and not to let anything distract you from that.
- Decide what business you are in and be in that business.
- Like core values, your core focus already exists, it’s just a matter of chiseling away the non-core items before you can get it.
- If you try to please everyone, you’re going to lose your ass.
- A guarantee is your opportunity to pinpoint an industry wide problem and solve it.
- When everything is important, nothing is important.
- A common mistake entails creating a structure to accommodate people you don’t like or don’t want to lose.
- If someone walks in with a monkey, they need to walk out with it. If they can’t or won’t, you’ve hired the wrong person.