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.

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.

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.

So, about that new, odd thing that's coming Monday

You can see the countdown to it on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Instagram.  Those pages will give you a tiny bit more data.  Sign into your accounts on all three, like these entries, and follow them, and more info will come to you.  On Monday, a lot more will come to you.

I'm excited.  I hope you will be, too.