Stop Confusing Patience With Delaying The Inevitable | Ep 843

Traction offers a helping hand for beginning entrepreneurs and others whose businesses are stuck at a point where hard work and determination are no longer enough for them to survive and grow. Business owner and consultant Gino Wickman explains how to structure your business using his Entrepreneurial Operating System to remove typical frustrations, so it regains momentum, it runs seamlessly, and you don’t get mired in details. The system is based on practical experience, not theory. Numerous tools and templates lead business owners step by step through processes to create a structure and core focus that strengthen and reenergize their organizations.

If you want to be a good leader, you have to put your team before yourself. Jocko Willink explains exactly how to do this in Leadership Strategy and Tactics. By learning to practice humility, build good relationships, and take responsibility for your team’s mistakes, you’ll elevate your team to success and empower them to become leaders themselves.

Willink is an author, speaker, and podcaster who served for 20 years as a US Navy SEAL. Through his military and leadership experience, he’s acquired a series of leadership principles and advice that he shares in this field manual. We’ll examine Willink’s leadership principles, comparing them to Principles: Life and Work, The Obstacle Is the Way, and more. We’ll also explore Willink’s advice through the lens of other leadership experts and psychologists to add nuances and actionable tips that will help you implement his ideas into your daily life.

The time between starting a business and success is marked by endless ups and downs. This is normal and necessary for growth, and in The Messy Middle, Scott Belsky argues that you should embrace this often overlooked aspect of entrepreneurship. During the “middle years” of your business, you’ll develop the skills you need to realize your goals. The uphill climb will be uncomfortable, but Belsky insists that it’s worth it.

Belsky is an entrepreneur best known for cofounding Behance, an online platform for creative artists. In this guide, we’ll explore the difficulties he says you’ll encounter once your startup gets going, as well as the skills you’ll need to cultivate. We’ll discuss how to keep your team motivated and how to cope with success if and when it comes. We’ll also cover writings from other business experts who expand on Belsky’s ideas or approach his views from a different perspective.

Why do some companies thrive while others fail? Better timing? Better ideas? Good luck? According to business leaders Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, the difference is execution—the dynamic practice of linking a company’s people, strategy, and goals to achieve results. In Execution, they explain that great leaders drive execution by constantly seeking accurate information about company operations, assessing progress toward big-picture goals, and supporting free-flowing communication. When leaders execute effectively and are actively involved in the company at ground level, they create a performance-oriented culture and keep everyone’s efforts focused on the goals that matter most.

In this guide, we’ll review Bossidy and Charan’s principles for powerful leadership and consider other authors’ ideas that support (and sometimes challenge) their assertions. We’ll also connect their theoretical principles to actionable tools and techniques you can use to propel your company toward more success.

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

Ben Horowitz was a public CEO through the dotcom bubble and burst. He learned a lot of hard lessons about how to build a company and get it to survive. Now co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he shares his advice to other founders and senior executives on getting through your company’s inevitable hard times.

The book covers a wide span of topics, including handling the psychology of a failing company, building a good place to work, scaling a company, and being a good CEO. It’s targeted to startup founders and CEOs, but there’s good advice here for anyone who wants to help build a better company.

Business leaders know that culture is the lifeblood of their organizations, and that the right culture can make the difference between success and mediocrity. But what exactly is culture? And how can you create the right culture for your organization while focusing on your company’s most important goals? These are the questions Ben Horowitz seeks to answer in What You Do Is Who You Are, based on his own experience as an entrepreneur and investor and the insights he gleaned from iconic historical figures.

In this guide, we’ll explore what Genghis Khan can teach you about inclusion, how revolutionary Toussaint Louverture can help you be a better role model, how the samurai can help you decide what really matters, and what ex-prison gang leader Shaka Senghor can teach you about consistently raising your standards. In addition, we’ll consider how Horowitz’s advice compares to that of other culture experts.