A business strategy book for the small business owner. One of many that might prove helpful

By Jeff L. “JLIPPIN” (Princeton, NJ USA)

I liked it. The book is well organized and does a nice job of expounding on its points. As I read it another book from 2007 came to mind: No Man’s Land: What to Do When Your Company Is Too Big to Be Small but Too Small to Be Big. Both books are written for the small business owner who has gotten his company to a certain level, but things are not growing or moving forward. The book has an Intro and nine chapters as follows:

0. Introduction
1. The “Entrepreneurial Operating System”
2. Letting go of the vine
3. The vision component
4. The people component
5. The data component
6. The issues component
7. The process component
8. The traction component
9. Pulling it all together

The book basically is a discussion of a diagram the author calls the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) which consists of six components discussed in chapters three through eight. As I say above, I found the organization of the book to be good. However, I did not find the organization of the EOS to be particularly sound. Not too long ago I read and reviewed Be Bodacious: Put Life in Your Leadership which I thought would have been better written if it had promoted the following leadership system: (1) Dream, (2) Strategize, (3) Take Action, & (4) Persist. The vision component in EOS is comparable to the dream component, and the traction component in EOS is comparable to the take action component. So, in my humble opinion, the EOS is missing two components at a minimum: (2) strategize & (4) persist.

I found the discussions regarding the issues component and the data component to be very well done. I also liked the discussions regarding people and process. However, I was wondering about three more components that seemed relevant to me, but were missing: business models, finance, and marketing. It is so much easier to strategize productively regarding your business if you dissect the business model it uses to exist. Financing considerations are always important when it comes to business, and it is naïve to talk about taking your company to a new level without considering finance in a big way, i.e., devote a chapter and a component to it. Lastly, a business without marketing will probably not last long as a business. So there should have been a chapter and component devoted to it, too.

The author claims in his Introduction that he is putting a new slant on strategic planning for the small business. I agree he certainly has created the EOS which I have never seen in print before. However, the underlying principles discussed in this book have been around for a long time. This book could be tagged as the following: business strategy, project management, problem solving, or leadership. And many books on these subjects have existed prior to 2007. See The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Project Management, 3rd Edition, Bare Bones Project Management: What you can’t not do, and Scrappy Project Management: The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces.