What kind of business would you build if you could build the business you want?

Not, what would it do, but how would it be?

My own answer: skippy.

This site is about turning any enterprise into the kind of company that skips along.

You know, where the staff skip in to work, ready, willing and able to take on the challenges of the day whilst working toward long term goals they care about. You know, where the products and services are so good that customers quietly appoint themselves as guerilla evangelists. You know, where the owners get what they want from their investments, in abundance.

It’s written for people who want their organisation to be the place where everyone wants to work, that’s the beacon of their industry, and has its products and services on every shortlist.

It’s about finding a way to go to market with great products and building a great company around them at the same time.

There’s a ton of ways to break down the job; I think of it in three layers:

Doing – overcoming the issues of day-to-day management that leaders face when building strong companies around compelling propositions or just trying to get things done. I try to deal with the realities of leadership, management and change.

Planning – the point of plans is in the planning. Building the business you want means making active choices that set direction and act as a compass for the “left a bit, right a bit, we didn’t think of that” manoeuvring of day to day doing.

Foundation-ing – identifying and committing to the business you want or the value you offer are amongst the most important, exciting and difficult acts a management or product team can undertake. I write about foundations in the belief that building strong and tall means pinning action to bed rock.

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About Nick

I live with my wife, two children and our beagle named Pi in Brighton, on England’s south coast.

I swim, bike and run in training for triathlons. My best Ironman was my first, in France; most beautiful and fastest (9:53), Karnten, Austria; toughest (12:23), Lanzarote; and I had varying degrees of misery/extasy in Switzerland, Florida and Arizona. Ironman: months of training followed by a single day in the sun; each race a ritual of humility, determination, patience and just showing up.

For work, I’m an organisation guy. I don’t mean corporate stooge, I mean I’m fascinated by how things happen, change and get done inside the walls of organisations. I’m not interested in steady-state, administering, incremental. I want to know how different teams can best set and achieve objectives? What levers move which parts? What leadership means? What makes a company break through? What is an organisation anyway?

Most importantly, what are the building blocks of great products, great teams and great companies?

You can reach me here: nick AT shearinglayers DOT com.

Background

I spent over ten years of my early career as a cog in multi-national machines. Most of the time I was just plain miserable — I felt I was stuck and that I was wasting my life.

It wasn’t that I was in dead end jobs. I had great jobs. It’s just that the jobs were better than the organisations.

My working life restarted when I got my first proper management job. As my responsibilities grew I started to learn how an organisation actually works, that there’s more to management than just getting people to do stuff, and that building great products is the centre of the circle. I’ve been trying to learn more about organisations and management ever since.

I’ve spent the past seven years consulting on leadership and go-to-market strategy, and I now try to write about both of them on this site.

Why?

1) Nobody should be miserable at work.
2) I feel like I have something to say and I want to reach more companies than is possible through my normal consulting work.
3) For my own benefit, writing things down helps me clarify.

The pursuit of skippiness is a challenge to anyone who wants to create a great company — one where everyone is glad to be involved, where successful and motivated staff, supported by owners who are getting what they want, create great products and services that customers love.