EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System)

Most owners invent their own way to set goals, run meetings and hold people to account. That works at five people and tends to break at twenty, when the owner can no longer be in every conversation. EOS replaces improvisation with the same routine every week. The value is less the vocabulary than the discipline: a short list of priorities, one meeting slot that never moves, and a habit of raising problems before they grow.

• Write a one-page vision stating where the company is going and how progress is measured.
• Draw the Accountability Chart: one owner for each function, and no function without one.
• Set Rocks, the few priorities that matter most this quarter, and give each one a single owner.
• Track five to fifteen numbers on a Scorecard that is reviewed every week.
• Run the Level 10 Meeting weekly, and work through the issues list with IDS.

EOS was set out by Gino Wickman in his book Traction. It gives an owner-run company a fixed set of tools instead of a homemade system. Each of the six components has its own tools: a one-page plan for vision, an accountability chart for people, a weekly scorecard for data, a list for issues, documented core processes, and quarterly priorities and a weekly meeting for traction.

• Adopting the vocabulary without the discipline. A weekly meeting that is skipped when work is busy is not EOS.
• Setting too many Rocks, so nothing moves.
• Treating it as software. EOS is a way of working, and a whiteboard or a spreadsheet is enough to start.