Four Words

I started writing this book in 2018. I stopped more than once, because building companies kept getting in the way of writing about why I build them. Looking back, that was a blessing. The years in between did something better than give me time to write. They tested the idea.

The idea fits in four words: wasted resources, useless steps.

Every organisation I have ever seen (including my own) leaks value in two ways. It owns resources it doesn't fully use. Materials it throws away. Heat it vents into the sky. Machines and buildings that stand idle. Talented people whose best skills are never asked for. Data that would be worth a fortune to somebody else, but earns nothing at home. And it works in chains full of steps nobody would design in today: layers that once earned their place by connecting, checking or moving things, and now mostly earn it by standing in the middle.

The first leak I call a wasted resource. The second a useless step. This book is about finding both. And about the two moves that turn them into value: trade the wasted resource with a silo where it is treasure, and cut the useless step so the maker meets the buyer again. One principle, two breaks. That's the whole book. Everything else is method and proof.

Where this book states a rule, there is usually a wreck behind it.

I didn't get to this idea alone, so let me be straight about whose shoulders I stand on. Gunter Pauli's Blue Economy showed years ago that one sector's waste can be another's raw material; his coffee-grounds-to-mushrooms example is in this book too, including what happened when someone tried to industrialise it. Waste to Wealth by Peter Lacy and Jakob Rutqvist gave managers the best taxonomy of wasted value the circular economy has. The lean movement of Womack and Jones spent thirty years hunting useless steps inside processes. Gillian Tett's The Silo Effect explained why organisations fall apart into tribes that can't see each other. And the Danish town of Kalundborg has simply been doing everything in this book since 1972, documented in a hundred academic papers.

So why another book? Because these shelves never meet. The circular economy books stop at one company redesigning its own business model. The exchange between two silos that each keep their own goal, the thing Kalundborg actually does, never became a method a manager can run on a Tuesday morning. Lean hunts useless steps inside one chain, but never asks whether a whole layer of middlemen is the useless step. Tett wants silos dissolved through culture change; I have spent a decade learning that silos never dissolve. And they don't need to. A silo that keeps its own goal and trades is worth more than a silo torn down. The platform books teach you how to become the new middleman; nobody teaches the maker how to need none. And in all those books, waste means atoms: materials, energy, maybe an idle machine. The two categories where I spent most of my working life, unused talent and unshared data, are in none of them.

Which brings me to my bias, and my credential: I build companies on both breaks. I spent the better part of a decade helping to build iSHARE, the European trust framework that lets organisations share data without giving it away. That's the first break, applied to the one resource you can trade without losing it. And I founded Directify to give makers a direct road to their buyers across borders. That's the second break, in software. I have watched both succeed and both struggle. This book reports the struggling just as faithfully, because I learned more from the exchanges that collapsed than from the ones that made the press releases. Where this book states a rule, there is usually a wreck behind it. I'll show you the wreck.

One promise before we start. I'm not going to ask you to be better than your own goals. Every method in this book assumes you will keep optimising your own castle, and shows why that is exactly the reason to trade. Sounds like a paradox? The next few pages take place in my garden, where two kids solved it before dinner.