My newest book, Limit Your Greed, is now available!

and I’m excited, proud, and nervous.

I’m excited both because it’s a new book and because I can finally talk about it.  Yes, this is the project I mentioned a while back.  It’s now finally here, and it is a truly lovely hardback.  Bill Catchings and I wrote it, and our team at Principled Technologies (PT) designed it. 

Click an image to see a larger version. 

For now, you can order the hardback only via the LYG site; as of this writing, the ordering page isn't even live.  Soon, you’ll be able to buy it via Amazon as well.  Right now, Amazon shows us as having one for sale, but that's only because we haven't yet correctly set up the ordering page.  I'll post an update in this blog as we fix these problems. 

I’m proud because I think this book does a good job of conveying a lot of potentially powerful ideas in a very compact space.  Both Bill and I dislike business books that are full of padding, so we tried to keep the text crisp and tight.  I’m also proud because this is not a book full of untested theories.  The principles in it are the ones by which we’ve run our main business, Principled Technologies, for 15 years.  PT is proof that a business can be profitable while still valuing people and principles over profit. 

I’m nervous on many fronts.  Like all new books, I’ve lived with this for a long time, so having it out in the world is always in some ways anticlimactic.  That’s particularly true in this case, because we’ve been working on this book for about six years and talking about it for even longer.  In addition, to avoid further delays--it takes time to sell a book--we chose to have our LYG company publish the volume.  This approach let us create a much nicer physical object than almost any publisher would have printed, and it let us deliver exactly the length we wanted without padding; it is a short volume.  It opens us, however, to all sorts of criticisms common to self-publishing endeavors.  It also means we could easily lose money on the book--and I’m accustomed to being paid by my publisher. 

What matters most about this book, though, is not my feelings.  What really counts is what this book might, just might be able to do:  help make the world better.  Our goal was to show that we could all approach businesses differently, create better businesses, and in the process build a better world.  We genuinely believe that is possible. 

To do this, though, we need your help.  Buy the book.  Read it.  Start conversations about ways that businesses could be better and do more to help both their employees and the world at large.  Even if you disagree with our specific ideas, talk about where you think we’re wrong.  Having the conversations is what matters, because from those conversations, change could come. 

We started promoting this idea in April with the shirts you can also buy at lyg.org.  Now, with the publication of Limit Your Greed, we hope to take a big step forward.

As naive and idealistic as it may sound, we firmly believe in the power of ideas to change the world, to make it better.  We hope the ideas in this book lead to better businesses and a better world. 

As we say on LYG, buy a book (or a shirt).  Start a conversation.  Change the world.

Searching for that perfect holiday present?

Search no longer.  Head over to LYG, pick up a t-shirt, start a conversation, and help change the world.

Wait for Black Friday to do it, and you just might save a nice chunk of money.

Yes, that's insider info:  as I wrote in an entry back in late April, Bill and I started and own the LYG business.  Our goal, as you can read at more length in that blog, is to help make the world a better place by building better businesses.

Yes, LYG is a for-profit business--in our dreams.  Right now, we're far from making any money on it, but if we ever do make a profit, half of all profits will go to charity.

Check it out.

In which I view wonderful art, eat a sublime meal, and break a toe(not in that order)

I broke the toe in the middle of the night, but I'll save that story (and a picture of one scary looking digit) for the end of this entry.  If you read to the point of that pic, don't blame me for what you see.

After nearly 12 hours of sleep, I awoke feeling considerably better than I had the past few days.  It's amazing how much all that rack time can help when you haven't slept more than four hours a night for the previous three nights.  I'm now quite tired again, but I hope to awaken fully refreshed after another long slumber.

After a rather large breakfast at a nearby diner

Click an image for a larger version. Do that with the toe pic, and you can't blame me.

A long and interesting cab ride later--at least one London cabbie thinks Trump is only saying what other people are thinking, alas--I arrived at the lovely Leighton House.  Though I once again was fortunate enough to see his unfinished Clytie, my reason for visiting this time was the traveling exhibition of well more than a hundred works of Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema.

The exhibition prohibited photography, so I have no images to share.  I can tell you only that it was an honor and a treat to be able to see paintings that spanned the time from when he was about sixteen, to the height of his powers, to one he did at 76 in the last year of his life, to an unfinished piece.  For my taste, he did much of his best work when he was more than sixty years old, a sign I find hopeful.

His two daughters, Laurence and Anna, and his second wife (their mother), Laura, were also all painters, and a few of their pieces were on display.  All were lovely paintings, which makes it sad that so little of their art remains.  Yet again, history neglects talented women when it should not.

The Leighton House's garden, which sits behind the building, was a lovely and cool place to sit and ponder the art I'd just seen.  It also seemed like a fine place to capture a shot of an LYG shirt visiting the UK (albeit on my body).

Dinner took me for the third time to the tiny but wonderful restaurant, The Araki.  The sushi there is the best I have ever had the privilege to taste.  They use astonishingly great ingredients, including, in this dish, summer truffles mixed with otoro, the most prized part of the belly of the blue fin tuna.

After a rest, some reading, some email, and general messing about, a bit of a walk took me for a late dessert to La Gelateria, home to some of the best gelato I've ever tasted (and I've eaten a great deal of gelato).

Oh, yeah:  the toe.  In the middle of the night, after awakening as usual at the end of an eighty-minute sleep cycle, I meant to step around the end of the bed to see the clock, which was turned the wrong way for me to see it from in the bed.  Instead, I hit my toe hard against a little luggage bench at the foot of the bed, in the process breaking the toe.

Am I sure I broke it?

Pretty sure.

I'm not going to let it slow me down at all; though, so as you'll have noted, I walked on it all day, and I'll do the same tomorrow.

The toe can either toughen up or get the hell off my foot.

I'm hoping for the first option.

Buy a shirt. Start a conversation. Change the world.

That's what we're trying to do over at LYG, and you can help. Check out the six cool t-shirt designs on offer there, order the ones you like, and when they arrive, you'll also get some key talking points on nifty little cards. Wear the shirts, start conversations, and get people talking about how businesses can make the world a better place--and still make a good profit.

If you don't want to spend the money for a shirt, that's cool; just start the conversations. We're not out to get rich from selling shirts. We just want to make things better for all of us.

We can do this. We can change the world for the better.

I hope you'll help.

Quick notes from Balticon

I had no early panel, so I got to sleep late for the second straight day.  It was delicious, better than dessert.  I won't have that luxury for the next three days, so I quite enjoyed it today.

I spent some time studying a painting by the artist guest of honor, Donato Giancola, and then had the opportunity to discuss it with him.  That conversation was a lot of fun.

In my panel, "It's All For a Good Cause," we talked about various ways to help with charities.  The audience was quite small, but I think we all enjoyed the hour we spent together.

Speaking of trying to do good things, did I mention that the LYG shirts are now available for order?  If not, pop over to LYG.org, pick up some shirts, start some conversations, and help us try to change the world!

Dinner was a decent but no better meal at Azumi.  I don't think I'll go there again, though, unless someone I trust recommends it.  The sushi wasn't up to par, and what they claimed was Australian Wagyu beef was nowhere near the quality of other such meat I've tasted.  Azumi's value is just not up to its cost.

I enjoyed some late-night conversations with friends, and now I must prep for tomorrow's panels!

TED 2017: A day that started well and ended wonderfully

The title for the morning sessions was Our Robotic Overlords. Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics kicked it off by showing one of his company's robots and discussing his vision of robotics. The demo was fun, but as someone who follows AI and robotics, I didn't learn a lot from it.

Noriko Arai followed with a discussion of the AI she is building in the hopes of one day passing the entrance exam to the University of Tokyo. Like the first talk, this one was pleasant but not particularly informative.

Stuart Russell's talk was also not particularly new, but I found it more intriguing because it focused on how to align human and AI values and objectives, a topic that might well be vital in the future.

Joseph Redmond's discussion and demo of image and object recognition showed that this technology is improving rapidly enough that in no time we can expect it to be in all of our smartphones and to be operating there at a high level of capability.

Tom Gruber, one of the creators of Siri, provided the most optimistic viewpoint of the session as he argued for what he called humanistic AI, AI that makes us all smarter.  I didn't find his arguments particularly compelling, but he clearly is an AI optimist.

In a fun break, Todd Rejchert debuted the Kitty Hawk Flyer. The initial unit will be available, they hope, late this year, and will fly only over water. I don't have a use in the world for such a device, but I sure would like to try one.

Schooling and other collective behaviors are fun to watch and to study, so I quite enjoyed Radhika Nagpal's talk. She reviewed the basics of this topic and discussed how her Harvard lab team built a set of 1,024 mini robots that they programmed to exhibit such behaviors.

After a short break, we returned to the theater for a session on a very different topic, The Human Response.

Rutger Bregman, an historian and writer, gave the most moving talk of the day to that point by pointing out that despite the belief of many, poverty is not a character flaw, and by then arguing for a basic income guarantee. He provided a lot of supporting data and left me leaning heavily toward this concept, which he claimed we could implement in the U.S. with a negative income tax for $175B, a price worth paying to lift all Americans out of poverty. Definitely catch this talk when it hits TED online.

Martin Ford's talk started by asking if we were heading to a future without jobs but ended up with another, albeit less compelling, argument for a basic income guarantee.

I've followed Patreon for some time but still found it interesting to hear the story from its founder, Jack Conte. We have no way to know just how well the concept is playing out, but right now he said that they have over 50,000 creators earning money via Patreon. I hope the platform continues to link audiences and artists effectively.

Sarah DeWitt argued for the potential positive power of screens in the hands of kids.

I'm still quite torn between the vision of his company that Ray Dalio presented and what I've read about it in other places, but certainly the general goal of an idea meritocracy is one I support in principle. Implementation, though, is everything in this case.

I've been a member of the ACLU for most of my adult life, so I was interested to hear what its executive director, Anthony Romero, would have to say. Despite his topics, which I care very much about, and his use of the art of Italian masters, which I have studied a bit, I found his talk ultimately a bit flat. I'm still grateful for the good work he does, but I wanted more from this talk.

This session closed superbly, however, with a talk from Vanessa Garrison and T. Morgan Dixon, the founders of GirlTrek. This group focuses on African-American women and girls and encourages them to walk as a way to fight health issues. I teared up at this talk and gave it a standing ovation, as did most of the people in the hall.

After lunch, which for me was some tasty mac-and-cheese with pulled pork from a food truck, I joined the first TED en Espanol session. I have no Spanish, so I listened to the talks via headphones and live translation.

All of the talks were at least interesting, but it's late and I'm running out of steam, so I'm going to mention only a few.

I enjoyed Jorge Drexler's music, but the rest of his talk felt less engaging.

Journalist Jorge Ramos, on the other hand, showed a dedication to journalism and a willingness to stand up for his beliefs that touched me, and watching him be thrown out of a Trump press conference (when Trump was a candidate) was chilling. Ramos deserved his standing ovation.

His talk's intensity, though, understandably paled next to that of the presentation from Ingrid Betancourt, which was one of the most riveting of the day. A candidate for the presidency of Colombia in 2002, Betancourt was kidnapped by guerilla rebels and held captive for six years. Her story of her struggles and how she fought with fear, her own violent urges, and hopelessness moved me greatly, and I was impressed by how much she came to forgiveness and the divine. I stood and clapped long and hard for her.

After another short break, we headed into the day's final session, Health, Life, Love. It began with a pleasant but otherwise straightforward interview of Serena Williams by Gayle King.

Atul Gawande really touched me with his story of how employing a coach not only improved his performance as a surgeon but ultimately proved instrumental in greatly increasing the quality of care in birthing centers in low-income areas.

Anna Rosling Ronnlund showed us a great way to visualize the degree of poverty and wealth in people all over the world with a demo of her project, Dollar Street. This is a site you're going to want to allow some time to play with and to study.

In a surprise move, TED Curator Chris Anderson then came on stage to announce that we were going to see the debut of a talk recorded earlier for TED 2017 by Pope Francis. I was blown away by the degree to which the Pope focused on solidarity and inclusiveness. This talk is already live on TED.com, with the title Why the only future worth building includes everyone, and you should check it out.

Jon Boogz and Lil Buck debuted an original dance that was at times moving and at other times just not my thing. Overall, I'm glad I got to see it.

The day ended with the award of the $1M TED Prize to Raj Panjabi, whose dream is to bring health care to the one billion people in the world's most remote communities. His approach is pragmatic and proven to work, and I hope his new organization, communityhealth.org, succeeds.

I was once again more than happy to stand and applaud.

A great end to a strong TED day.

Buy a shirt. Start a conversation. Change the world.

I’ve been teasing for a while now that today I would announce one of the odder things I’ve done. I’m happy to deliver on that promise by introducing you to Limit Your Greed (formally LYG, LLC), a new company that my business partner, Bill Catchings and I are starting. You can visit its site here.

As friends and long-time readers know, Bill and I are the founders and co-owners of Principled Technologies, Inc. PT is the leading fact-based marketing and learning services provider, but it is also — and always has been — a social experiment.  Bill and I started PT in part to see if it was possible to build a business that follows very different principles from traditional businesses and yet still does well and makes a profit.

With PT now in its 15th year, we’re happy to report that the experiment is a success. You can run a business very differently and still do well.

Now, we want to take that lesson to a broader audience—in fact, to everyone—and try to change the world. We want to do so by persuading business owners and executives to choose to do something both simple and radical: to take less so that others can have more. To limit their greed.

Our goal is not new government legislation; instead, we’re hoping to help start a movement in which folks choose to build different businesses and help make the world better for a lot of people.

One way in which we hope to do that is by selling a book, Limit Your Greed, which we’re still working on but should finish soon.

Another is today’s announcement.

As the site says, “Philosophically, LYG is a movement. Practically, it’s a clothing company.”

The idea is simple: Buy shirts that contain challenging and conversation-worthy slogans. The first is “Limit your greed.” Another is “Nobody wins unless everyone wins.” Each shirt comes with talking points. When someone asks what your shirt means, you have a chance to show them a better way for businesses large and small to behave.

I don’t want to repeat all of the material on the site, so let me instead point you to its Practice page for answers to the questions about how to make this happen.

Of course, you could just buy the shirts because they’re cool—and they are. They’re made in North Carolina, where we’re based, from cotton grown here, and they’re soft and lovely to the touch. The designs are nifty, both visually appealing and conversation-worthy.

You could also buy the shirts in the hopes LYG makes a profit, because if it does, half of all profits will go to charity.

What we most hope, though, is that you will buy the shirts—Get ‘em all! Collect the whole set!—and help us change the world.

I have to warn you that you can’t buy the shirts quite yet. That’s intentional. Bill and I will be wearing one of these shirts each day at TED, which we’re attending this week. To help make sure no one felt we were flogging products—a TED no-no we take seriously—we didn’t want them available for sale yet.

So no, we’re not wearing the shirts at TED to sell them. We’re wearing them to do what we hope you will join us in doing: start conversations, and change the world.

I promised odd, and I think that me going into the movement and clothing business is odd enough to make that promise real.

Odd or not, though, I hope you join us in this movement. Together, we can make the world better.