Hi {{first_name|there}},
This is a From the Desk letter. It's an extra Thursday send that lands about once a month, so I get to go longer and looser than I do on Mondays. Think of this one as a rant.
First, I'm not against the book Traction. Traction to Freedom is a bolt-on, in addition to Traction, not a core cadence.
The rhythms, the meetings, the structure and the accountability built into EOS and Traction are highly valuable, and you'll notice a lot of commonalities with what I teach. But Traction was not built to help you decide what to work on. It was built to make sure the things you already think are important get worked on. Your weekly L10 meeting makes sure things are actually happening. That's all fantastic.
The problem is when you're busy working on things that aren't worthwhile, or aren't the focus you should have. You can have the best rhythms, the best meetings, the best to-do lists, the best check-ins and the best accountability. If you work on the wrong things, your business still moves in a direction you don't want. It moves that way no matter how much action you take or effort you put in.
This is more common than not. Teams stay busy and productive, and people get things done. But the work doesn't create the outcomes, and the business keeps moving the wrong way.
That's what I'm here to solve. The meetings, the quarters, the annuals and the conversations, we have different ways of doing those. A 90-minute meeting is a little overkill in a virtual world sometimes, and sometimes it's necessary. Every department on Zoom is rough. Some of what we do is more modern, more for today than when the book was written. But at the end of the day, we need to be working on the right thing.
Say you have five leaders on your leadership team, each running a department. Each of them has 3 to 5 projects, and 1 or 2 of those are critical. The rest are important, but the critical ones need to get done.
That's a great rhythm. Five leaders with 3 to 5 projects each is 15 to 25 projects a quarter, and 5 to 10 of them are the critical ones. Have the leadership team drive them.
If the company as a whole has one, maybe two constraints, let's rally around those. If someone doesn't play a role in that specific thing, give them something that moves it along. We need to be thinking about how we drive the core items forward.
I'd rather you have bad meetings and finish the 2 or 3 most important things every quarter than have great meetings and work on 80 things that may not get you where you want to go.
Traction doesn't tell you to put 50, 80 or 100 metrics on your scorecard. Talk to someone who lives and breathes Traction and they'll tell you there's a better way. But the guardrails aren't there, and the decision-making process doesn't exist.
So here's the point. Focusing on what matters matters more than focusing on a lot of things. Getting the right things done is more important than getting a lot of things done. That means knowing what to work on in your business and seeing the numbers you actually care about.
The first question is this: did profit move in the right direction or not, and did you expect it? Profit moving the right way is the proof you need to keep pushing that way. A reinvestment quarter where you make less profit, or even lose some, can be necessary, especially if it was intentional. But it should have been done with a reason. "I'm going to spend more money on marketing to drive profit up." "I'm going to put more infrastructure in to drive profit up." It should have been calculated and understood.
Most times, though, profit moves the wrong way, and we go looking for a new number to track instead of understanding the core constraint.
When that happens, the owner, and maybe the leadership team, needs to step back, run the diagnostic, understand why, and find the biggest constraint in the business. The profit-per-acquisition model was built to help you figure this out much faster than guessing. Identify the constraint, and make sure everybody is aligned going in, knowing this is the core constraint you want to solve this quarter.
Here's the hill I'll die on. We need to understand what we're working on, why we're working on it, and who's working on it. That is more important than any other rhythm we can install.
This coming Monday, November 16, 2026 at 12:00 PM ET, I'm launching my book in a free live webinar. It's also my birthday, and I'd love for you to be there. Go to fromtractiontofreedom.com to register.
Steve