The short answer

How will we take this product to market and build a great company?

The longer answer

It seems simple enough. You have an idea, turn it into a new product or service, the market laps it up. Repeat.

Reality is a little different. Bringing new ideas to market is an act of will and making them shine isn’t as easy as placing them in the sun.

• Market – who is the customer, where are they, what do they want, how do they buy, what is their pain?
• Product – what are we selling, what’s in the box, what’s the magic source, what’s the total package?
• We – who is we, who are our partners, what channel, who’s on the team, how do we fit together, why us?
• How – what’s the plan, how do we sell, how do we talk about it?

The answers are the building blocks of every business. Delivering against them takes focus, clarity, commitment and discipline.

This blog is about finding ways to go to market with great products whilst building a great company around them.

I call it the pursuit of skippiness and break the job down into 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. In this blog I try to deal with some of the questions of leadership, management and change that come my way.

Planning – the point of plans is in the planning. I cover some of the “how to” of planning, which really 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 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’m an independent management consultant specialising in strategy development.

In work clothes, 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 set and achieve their best 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 success for great products, great teams and great companies?

I also 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/ecstasy 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.

I live with my wife, two children and a beagle named Pi in Brighton, on the south coast of England.

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