Over a Pint

I should probably tell you how this actually started, because it wasn't in a boardroom and it definitely wasn't in a strategy deck. It started over a pint.

I had started building a small task app for myself, something lightweight that helped me organise work and collaborate with other people, and I wanted to show Neil and the team what had suddenly become possible. I was sat across from Neil, who I'd worked with for years by that point, and I remember saying something like, "I think we're about to have more capability than we know what to do with, and nobody's noticed yet." Neil gave me the look he gives me when he thinks I've had one too many, or one too few, and said, "Go on then." So I did.

Somewhere around that conversation, a stray thought started becoming a shape. It wasn't a business plan and it wasn't a pitch. It was simply a different way of looking at what had become possible.

I've written this book the way I told it to Neil that night, and the way I've told it to a few other people since, in kitchens and car parks and the corners of conferences where the real conversations happen. If you're the sort of person who prefers a slide with three bullet points and a call to action, I'll warn you now that this isn't that. This is the uncut version. The version with the doubt still in it, and the wrong turns still in it, because the wrong turns are usually where the useful part is hiding.

What follows is the story of how a fairly ordinary IT career, spent mostly keeping restaurants and hotels running, ended up somewhere I never expected. It's about constraints, and what happens when they disappear without anyone announcing it. It's about why software has spent decades making businesses adapt to it, when it should always have been the other way round. And it's about what I think happens next, for anyone running a business with more good ideas than budget and more operational knowledge than time to write it down.

Grab a drink. This will take a while, but I promise it's worth the second pint.