The Skills You Learn on a Market Stall

Updated 25th August 2026. Added new atlas location, tidied article.

Trade Skills: What Commercial Awareness Actually Means — and Why It Is So Rare

Every weekend, in towns and cities across Britain, there are still markets.

You can find them selling food, flowers, fruit and vegetables, records, clothes, cakes, candles, dubious electrical goods, delicious cheese and, yes, even artisanal soap. They are noisy energetic places, slightly chaotic places, places where people shout across one another and where the distinction between buying and selling is remarkably, and refreshingly, obvious.

I like markets. I like them a lot. Partly because they are enjoyable to wander around, but also because they are one of the few remaining places where you can see commerce happening in its natural habitat, a bit like a car boot sale too. There is no strategy deck. No suited consultants offering standard solutions. No transformation programme. Nobody has commissioned a four-week diagnostic to establish whether customers might prefer the blue one, or one in pink, or something else entirely. Someone has made or bought something, put it on a table and is now trying to persuade another human being to give them money for it.

That sounds ridiculously simple. It is also rather close to the entire purpose of business.

I grew up in Sheffield, where we had two large indoor markets as well, so even when the weather was awful, which is quite common for Sheffield, you could still wander around a market, look at what people were buying, chat to the stallholders and come home with your weekly supplies, and of course, random things you didn't really need.

Markets have made something of a comeback in recent years. Here in Winchester, we now have the Helch Market, an indoor food market with bars, restaurants and music, and there are similar places appearing in cities all over the country. The indoor food market in Leeds is impressive too.

At the same time, there has been a resurgence in the building and home trades. Several of my sons' friends are choosing trades rather than the more conventional route into further education, partly because university has become an extraordinarily expensive way of discovering that you still don't know what you want to do.

And this got me thinking. Because there is something interesting happening here. We have spent decades treating the trades as a category of work that requires practical skills — plumbing, electrics, carpentry, bricklaying, decorating — while the world of professional work has increasingly congratulated itself on being more sophisticated, intellectual and elite.

But I wonder whether we have got the distinction backwards. Perhaps the problem with a surprising amount of modern business is that we have lost our trade skills. Not the ability to wire a socket or build a wall, obviously, although there are days when I suspect either would be more entertaining than another PowerPoint presentation.

I mean the skills required to actually do business: to deal with customers, understand commercial reality, make sensible decisions, communicate clearly, learn through doing, understand numbers, manage risk and, above all, turn something you know into something somebody else finds useful.

Because when you strip away the language of modern business – the frameworks, methodologies, operating models, transformations, strategic pillars and beautifully designed slides with nice fonts – this is still what we are trying to do.

Take a good idea. Put some time, money, attention and energy behind it. Make something. Get it into the world. See what happens. Learn. Adjust. Keep going. And, eventually, we create something that another human being considers valuable enough to give us some money for.

Somewhere along the way we have become rather good at making this more complicated. We borrow frameworks to solve problems we don't actually have, construct elaborate measurement systems to demonstrate progress towards outcomes nobody particularly wants, and spend millions on transformations while spending surprisingly little time teaching people how to actually operate in a commercial environment.

Which brings me to trade skills.

The phrase comes from Paul Hawken's Growing a Business, where he references an idea from Phillips and Raspberry's Honest Business. I have never managed to track down the original book, which is rather irritating because I like the idea of having a proper citation for this. But the source matters less than the list.

They identified four trade skills. Hawken added a fifth. I'm going to add another.

And when I look at them now, years after I first encountered the idea, they seem almost subversive and radical in the modern workplace precisely because they are so ordinary.

These are the things that make someone useful. They are also what I mean when I talk about commercial awareness. Not commercial awareness in the narrow sense of being able to read a P&L, calculate a margin or recite the difference between revenue and profit without accidentally looking completely lost.

I mean the human version. The ability to understand what is actually going on, to deal with reality, to make sensible bets, to learn from experience, to communicate with other people and to connect your work to something that matters.

These are not particularly fashionable skills.

They don't come with certificates. You can't put a badge for them on LinkedIn and the folk over there will mostly scoff at how basic your thinking is. Most job descriptions don't explicitly ask for them, which is perhaps one reason so many candidates arrive with impressive qualifications and surprisingly little evidence that they can actually do anything with them.

Yet in every organisation I have worked in, consulted with or built, these qualities have consistently separated the people who get things done from the people who are extremely good at describing getting things done.

Six skills that determine whether ideas survive contact with reality

1. Persistence

Persistence comes from the Latin persistere: to remain, to stand firm, to continue.

It is not a particularly fashionable quality. There is a strong current in modern work culture suggesting that if something feels difficult, tedious or unpleasant, you should probably stop doing it and find something more aligned with your purpose. Sometimes this is excellent advice. There are certainly jobs that should be abandoned, meetings that should be escaped and PowerPoint decks that should be buried in the communal garden.

But almost everything worthwhile I have built has involved a period in which the work was, frankly, rather boring. Or difficult. Or repetitive. Or all three, which is the point at which most people start searching for a podcast about finding their true calling.

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has built anything of substance, when effort changes character. At first you are fighting the work. Everything feels awkward and tough. You don't know what you're doing, you make mistakes, and every small obstacle seems to confirm your thinking that you have made a terrible career decision.

Then, if you stay with it, something changes. The difficulty becomes information. You start to see the pattern. You stop wrestling with the work and start learning from it. That is when effort becomes craft.

Persistence is not stubbornness, and it certainly isn't glorified suffering, which is also quite popular on social media. It is the willingness to remain present long enough for the work to teach you something.

A few years ago there was a fashion in conference speaking culture for talking about avoiding "bad work" – the tedious, difficult, soul-destroying stuff that apparently stood between us and our best selves.

My experience has been almost exactly the opposite.

Some of the most transformative work I have done has been exactly the work I didn't particularly want to do, at least initially. The trick is knowing when the difficulty is teaching you something and when it is merely wasting your finite resources.

That, unfortunately, is another trade skill.

2. The ability to face facts

I describe this in my own work as leaning into current reality.

It is the discipline of looking at what is actually happening rather than what we would prefer to be happening, which sounds a remarkably obvious thing to write until you spend a few years around organisations and discover that reality is often treated as an optional input. Or in many cases, something to be actively avoided.

We are remarkably imaginative creatures when it comes to avoiding inconvenient facts. Sales are down because the market is difficult. The programme is behind because people haven't adopted the new process. Customers aren't buying because they don't understand the proposition. The strategy is fine; execution is the problem.

Sometimes all of these things are true. But sometimes they are simply more comfortable stories than the alternative.

Facing facts means taking in what the evidence is actually telling you and beginning from there, rather than from the version of events that makes everyone feel slightly better about the decisions they made six months ago.

This is astonishingly difficult for leaders because sometimes the person being asked to diagnose the problem is also the person who helped create it. There is a very human temptation to soften the diagnosis when you had a hand in the original decision.

But movement starts with truth. Reality is not the enemy. Denial is.

And the cost of pretending is rarely static. If a problem is costing you £100,000 a month, then spending another six months debating whether the problem is really a problem is not neutral. You have simply chosen to spend another £600,000 proving that you were right to be optimistic.

3. The ability to minimise risk

Notice the wording. Minimise risk, not eliminate it. Eliminating risk is mostly a fantasy, unless your strategy is to never do anything interesting or exciting. Ironically, that is a high risk in itself too.

Every meaningful commercial decision involves some form of uncertainty. You are deciding where to put money, time, energy, attention or reputation without knowing exactly what will happen next.

The skill is therefore not courage. It is proportion. Good operators understand what they are actually betting on, what could go wrong, what the consequences would be, and whether those consequences are survivable.

This matters because risk in organisations is rarely abstract. Behind the spreadsheet are people's money, careers, livelihoods and reputations. The decision that looks like a small experiment on a strategy slide can be a rather different proposition for the person whose career is attached to its success.

The best operators I have worked with are therefore rarely reckless. They are thoughtful. They gather enough information to understand the bet, consider the downstream consequences, and then make a decision that they would be comfortable explaining six months later when everyone is considerably less enthusiastic about the original PowerPoint, and looking for someone to blame.

That is judgement. And judgement is a skill. You don't acquire it by reading a definition of judgement. And you certainly don't get it by outsourcing your thinking to AI.

You acquire it by making careful decisions, discovering that some were wrong, understanding why, and gradually becoming less wrong.

4. The ability to be a hands-on learner

This one has shaped almost my entire career. Almost everything I have built – systems, frameworks, courses, consulting approaches, workshops – came from doing first and naming later.

That order matters. Theory is useful, but theory is still theory until it has had to survive contact with reality. You can read ten books about running a workshop and still discover, when twenty-seven people arrive at nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning, that nobody has brought a pen, and most of them don't want to be there.

You can understand a framework perfectly and discover that the person sitting opposite you doesn't care about your framework, and has one of their own that they want to see implemented.

You can design the ideal process and then discover that the person expected to use it has already invented a workaround because your ideal process takes seventeen minutes longer.

This is why knowledge earned through practice feels different. It has texture and taste. It contains all the things the textbook left out: timing, judgement, edge cases, awkward conversations, broken assumptions, shortcuts, workarounds, assimilation to other experiences you've had, and the personal knowledge of what tends to happen when a perfectly sensible idea encounters an actual human being who thinks differently to you.

There is an old wheelwright proverb that captures this beautifully. The expert cannot fully explain what they spent twenty years learning, not because the knowledge is mystical, but because much of it lives in judgement, timing and accumulated experience.

You cannot simply download that. You have to earn it. Nothing worth knowing can be fully taught.

5. The ability to grasp numbers

This is the one Paul Hawken added.

I am not naturally a numbers person. Mathematics was never my strong suit, in fact, my maths teacher said I couldn't tell the difference between my elbow and my backside, and I have spent enough of my life staring at spreadsheets to know that they do not become more interesting simply because you stare at them harder.

But I eventually learned the numbers that mattered.

Enough to understand profit and loss, customer lifetime value, cost to serve, investment and return, and the relationship between what an organisation is doing and what that activity is producing. That is usually enough. You don't need to become an accountant.

You do need to know when the story being told about value doesn't match the cost numbers.

Numbers are not the whole story, but they are one of the languages in which organisations make decisions. If you cannot engage with that language at all, you are effectively handing over part of your ability to influence what happens next.

You may have the best idea in the room. If you cannot explain what it might be worth, what it will cost, what you're asking the organisation to bet and how you will know whether the bet is working, somebody else gets to make the decision.

Grasping numbers, even imperfectly, gives you a seat at that table.

And the one I would add: communication

This is mine.

And without it, I think the other five are incomplete.

You can persist brilliantly, face facts honestly, manage risk intelligently, learn through experience and understand the numbers – but if you cannot communicate any of that to another human being, you are going to have a remarkably difficult time turning your knowledge into value.

Communication is how meaning moves. It is how we create understanding, make decisions, explain what we are doing, help other people see what we see and, ultimately, get people moving in the same direction.

This is why I describe communication as the wiring in my Idea to Value system.

An organisation can have a brilliant idea, capable people and plenty of resources, but if nobody is clear about what is happening, why it matters, what needs to happen next or what success actually looks like, all that capability starts to behave rather like an expensive congregation of talented people with nothing to do.

A great deal of what looks like a delivery problem is actually a clarity problem. People are not necessarily unwilling. They may simply not understand what is being asked of them or which direction they're supposed to be moving in.

They may understand the task but not the reason. They may understand the reason but disagree with it. They may agree with the direction but have no idea what they are personally supposed to do.

Or everyone may be doing exactly what they think they should be doing while pulling in five different directions. Communication is the mechanism through which those things become visible.

At its heart, communication is simply the creation of understanding. And understanding is a prerequisite for alignment.

Why these skills matter

Taken together, these skills form the human infrastructure of commercial awareness. Not the MBA version. The lived version. The version you notice when someone is given a messy problem and, rather than immediately reaching for a framework, starts by asking what is actually happening.

Persistence gets you through the long middle between an idea and an outcome, which is where an staggering number of good ideas lose meaning. Facing facts stops you confusing activity with progress. Minimising risk allows you to make bets that are ambitious without being stupid. Hands-on learning gives you knowledge that exists in the real world rather than merely in your head.

Numbers tell you whether the thing you have been doing has actually created value. And communication allows all of that information and understanding to travel through other people.

I saw the importance of this particularly clearly when I was part of a team recruiting hundreds of people. I rejected a surprising number of candidates who looked extremely qualified on paper. The reason was not that they lacked technical ability because often they were extremely capable, with a significant number of qualifications. They simply lacked these trade skills.

They could talk about strategy but struggled to deal with reality. They could describe innovation but had little evidence of having built anything. They could explain a sophisticated approach to risk but couldn't make a sensible decision when the information was incomplete. They had qualifications but not necessarily judgement and knowledge. Experience but not necessarily learning from that experience.

And sometimes, most importantly, they couldn't explain what they were trying to do in a way that made another person want to help them do it.

This is why I have become increasingly interested in the idea of trade skills. They are not glamorous. Nobody becomes a LinkedIn thought leader by announcing that their secret to success is grasping numbers and sticking with difficult things.

But perhaps they should.

Because modern work has become extraordinarily sophisticated at teaching people how to talk about value, while remaining surprisingly inconsistent at teaching them how to create it. We have built entire industries around transformation, strategy, innovation and change. And yet the underlying skills required to make any of those things work remain remarkably ordinary.

Persist. Face facts. Minimise risk. Learn by doing. Understand the numbers. Communicate.

They are not fashionable and they are not easily credentialed. They don't fit neatly into a competency framework. But they are the skills that allow an idea to survive the journey from someone's head into the world, where it has to contend with customers, budgets, colleagues, competitors, mistakes, climate, politics, technology, bad timing, good luck and the person who forgot to bring a pen. In other words, reality.

And perhaps that is what commercial awareness really is. Not knowing how business works in theory. Knowing how to make something work in the reality of the work itself.

Those are trade skills. And, like most useful trades, you learn them by getting your hands dirty.