Books like Measure What Matters: five to read next
Good books like Measure What Matters: The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt (find the bottleneck), The Balanced Scorecard by Kaplan and Norton (measure the business from several sides), Traction by Gino Wickman (a meeting rhythm for small companies), Peter Drucker's work on management by objectives, and Steer, Don't Guess, which links them with a refusal order, zones and levers.
In this article · 10 sections
- Books like Measure What Matters, by the problem they solve
- The Goal: books like The Goal start here
- The Balanced Scorecard: measure more than money
- Traction: a rhythm for small companies
- Drucker on management by objectives
- Steer, Don't Guess: the one that links them
- Which one to read next
- Where this list does not reach
- Try before you buy
- Published research
Measure What Matters sells a simple, powerful idea: pick a few ambitious objectives, attach measurable key results, and the organisation aligns. John Doerr tells it through the stories of Intel, where Andy Grove built the method, and Google, where Doerr brought it.
If you finished it fired up and then tried OKRs in a small business, you may have hit questions like these. What happens when two key results collide? When is a number bad enough to drop everything? And what exactly do I do on Monday? The books below each answer part of that. Full disclosure: I wrote the last one on the list, and I will be as specific about its limits as about the others.
Key results collide, and Monday has no clear move. That's where OKRs stall in a small business. The Jirgenson Model answers with a control system: goals in a refusal order, zones for each number, and levers to pull. It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934).
Books like Measure What Matters, by the problem they solve
| Book | Author | The problem it solves best | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Measure What Matters | John Doerr | Focus: a few goals with measurable results | Teams that need alignment |
| The Goal | Eliyahu Goldratt | Finding the bottleneck that limits the whole system | Operations, production, anyone stuck on throughput |
| The Balanced Scorecard | Robert Kaplan and David Norton | Measuring the business from several sides, not only finance | Managers who see only the money column |
| Traction | Gino Wickman | A practical operating rhythm and meeting system for small companies | Owners who want structure for a team |
| Drucker on management by objectives | Peter Drucker | Agreed goals and personal responsibility for them | Anyone delegating goals to people |
| Steer, Don't Guess | Martin Jirgenson | What to do when goals collide, numbers turn red and plans drift | Small business owners, freelancers, families |
The Goal: books like The Goal start here
Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal is a business novel: a plant manager has months to save his factory, and through it the reader learns the Theory of Constraints. The idea that sticks is that a system moves only as fast as its tightest bottleneck, so improving anything else is wasted effort. It is one of the rare management books people read for pleasure.
What to take from it: find the constraint first. Where it stops: it does not tell you how to choose between goals, or when to stop fixing and leave a doomed market.
The Balanced Scorecard: measure more than money
Kaplan and Norton argue that financial measures alone do not show where a business is heading. Their scorecard looks from four sides: finance, customers, internal processes, and learning and growth. If your reports are all revenue and profit, this book widens the view.
What to take from it: several sides of the business, measured deliberately. Where it stops: it does not say which side wins when two of them conflict.
Traction: a rhythm for small companies
Gino Wickman's Traction describes the Entrepreneurial Operating System: a set of practices and a meeting rhythm built for small and mid-sized companies. It is concrete and immediately usable, which is why so many owners swear by it.
What to take from it: a weekly rhythm that keeps a team honest. Where it stops: it gives practices more than a framework that explains why each practice is needed.
Drucker on management by objectives
Peter Drucker is where much of modern goal setting begins. Management by objectives, agreed goals with someone personally responsible for each, is the ancestor of OKRs. Reading Drucker is reading the source.
What to take from it: goals are agreed and owned. Where it stops: it says less about the rhythm of review within a period or how to steer by forecast.
Steer, Don't Guess: the one that links them
Here is the honest pitch for my own book, as a comparison rather than an advertisement. It does not replace any of the books above. It takes something from each and adds what a small business feels most sharply:
| From | It takes | It adds |
|---|---|---|
| OKR (Grove, Doerr) | A few goals with measurable results | A refusal order between goals, error zones, levers per goal |
| Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan, Norton) | Several sides of the business | An explicit order, three zones per number, a protocol when several are red |
| MBO (Drucker) | Agreed goals, personal responsibility | A review rhythm within the period and control by forecast |
| Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) | Finding the bottleneck | A check of the environment, and the bottleneck as the cause of a red number |
| EOS (Wickman) | A meeting rhythm for small companies | The goal, state and error framework that explains why each practice works |
It is built around a coffee shop owner, a freelance designer and a thirteen-year-old saving for a bicycle, with every number worked out. Its appendices include a free rulebook and prompt that make an AI assistant analyse a business situation by the method; in a blind test it scored 88.8 out of 100 against 67.7 for a good generic consultant prompt. If you want to see how it compares with OKRs on one concrete set of goals, the side-by-side is in an OKR alternative for small business.
Where it stops: it is designed for one person or a small team working mostly on paper, which is why it caps a goal list at nine. Large organisations with many teams need alignment tools it does not try to provide.
Which one to read next
- Your team is unfocused: Measure What Matters, or Traction if you want the meeting system too.
- Work piles up at one step: The Goal.
- You only look at the money: The Balanced Scorecard.
- Your goals collide and every week feels like a crisis: Steer, Don't Guess.
Where this list does not reach
Six books cannot cover management, and this list leans towards measurement and goals rather than leadership, strategy or finance. The short descriptions are mine and are no substitute for reading the originals. Every one of these books is worth your time; the point is to pick the one that matches the problem in front of you.
Key takeaways
- Measure What Matters gives focus; The Goal finds the bottleneck; The Balanced Scorecard widens what you measure.
- Traction adds a practical rhythm for small companies; Drucker supplies the source of goal ownership.
- Steer, Don't Guess links them with a refusal order, zones and levers, for when goals collide.
- Choose by the problem you have this month, not by the bestseller list.
Try before you buy
You can read the Introduction and Chapter 1 of Steer, Don't Guess free in the free sample, including the refusal test that decides which goal wins when two collide. If it answers the question Measure What Matters left open for you, the full book is on Amazon.
Published research
It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:
- Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
- Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
- Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
- GitHub: experiment folder
- Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
- ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552
The full chapter, with every calculation, is in the book.
Buy on AmazonQuestions people ask
What books are similar to Measure What Matters?
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, The Balanced Scorecard by Kaplan and Norton, Traction by Gino Wickman, Peter Drucker's writing on management by objectives, and Steer, Don't Guess by Martin Jirgenson, which adds a refusal order, zones and levers for small businesses.
What should I read after The Goal?
If you liked finding the bottleneck, read something that helps you choose between goals and steer week to week, such as Measure What Matters for focus or Steer, Don't Guess for priorities, zones and forecasts.
Which management book is best for a small business owner?
It depends on the problem. For team focus, Measure What Matters or Traction; for a single bottleneck, The Goal; for colliding goals and constant firefighting, Steer, Don't Guess.
This topic is covered in Chapter 14, One model for every field (How the model differs from familiar approaches) of Steer, Don't Guess: Setting Priorities, Reading the Numbers and Correcting Course in Business and Life. The numbers in the examples are illustrative; the book states its limits in Appendix G.
Read Chapter 1 free
The Introduction and Chapter 1, with the refusal test, about 9,500 words.