Glossary
V/TO®
The V/TO, short for Vision/Traction Organizer, is a two-page form answering eight questions about where a company is going and what it will do next. Page one holds core values, the Core Focus™, a ten-year target, the marketing strategy and the three-year picture. Page two holds the one-year plan, this quarter's Rocks and the issues list.
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How EOS® uses the V/TO
The V/TO gets filled in over the two Vision Building® days and reopened at every quarterly session. It is read out loud rather than circulated, and the questions are answered in order because the later ones depend on the earlier ones. A leadership team is considered finished when all eight answers are shared by every person in the room.
Strategy documents fail because nobody can repeat them. Two pages with eight headings can be recited from memory by the fifth quarter, which is the only version of a plan that survives a busy week. The format also forces an answer to the questions companies prefer to leave open, such as who the customer is not.
Worked example: A distributor of industrial parts spent most of its first Vision Building day arguing about the target market and never reached question four. That was the useful part. Two of the owners had been selling to contractors while the third chased municipal contracts, and neither side had said so plainly. The one-year plan they eventually wrote dropped the municipal work.
Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Vision; eosworldwide.com/eos-tools
Core Values
Core values are the three to seven behaviors a company actually hires, fires and promotes on, written in words people already use at work.
02Core Focus
The Core Focus is a two-part answer to why the company exists and what it should stick to: its purpose or cause, and the niche it is genuinely good at.
033-Year Picture™
The 3-Year Picture is a short written description of the company three years out, carrying a date, revenue and profit figures and a few measurables.
041-Year Plan
The 1-Year Plan is the coming twelve months written as a date, revenue and profit numbers, a few measurables and three to seven goals to finish.
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