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.
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