Traction by Gino Wickman

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Bias confession: I bought this and read it on my own time out of bitterness for my department not being included in the glorified book club (i.e., “leadership team”) who read it at work.

It’s decently written, but it has all the predictable, eye-roll-inducing elements of most management fads. It uses a bunch of catchy buzzwords to rephrase the same tautology of almost every other business management book in existence. It has all the out-of-touch ideas and grandiose promises that most management consultants have spouted since the beginning of modern business history. It uses pretty little phrases such as “free up the futures” to describe the process of firing employees. Meanwhile, I could easily apply uglier wording to the same topics (e.g., “destabilize the futures”). There are two pages worth of “EOS Worldwide Trademarked Terms” in the back of the book, which consists of such groundbreaking word combinations as “Focus” and “Day.” In other news, I hope to trademark this great new idea I have with the words “Bull” and “Crap.”

I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not responsible for the operation of an organization. I’m only a lowly, average Joe employee who isn’t important enough to be included in the company book club (“leadership team”). I know my opinion doesn’t count for much, but EOS seems like a sketchy sales pitch. They have a five-book library and encourage companies to hire an EOS Implementer® to implement EOS “purely throughout your organization.” It seems a bit much considering all of the ideas in EOS are just cutesy words to describe extremely obvious organizational concepts.

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𝓟.𝓢. This review was crossposted from Goodreads because it contains actual thoughts rather than a typically facetious single-sentence remark. View all my book ratings and pointless takes on Goodreads or The StoryGraph.