We’re publishing with Pearson in May 2026.
We’ve written a book about why organisations routinely make poor spending decisions. It is not because they lack data or analytical skill, but because they misread value, as it turns out, in systematic and predictable ways. At scale, spending decisions become one of the quietest and most powerful ways value is redistributed often away from purpose and towards inertia.
Across hundreds of projects, the same behavioural patterns were visible: clinging to historic precedents, poor at assessing their own levels of skill, familiarity bias mistaken for reliability, undue priority for anything they’d done internally, and complexity blindness that hides the cost of doing nothing.
What began as a practical business book: an appeal for more focus on spending as well as on perpetual growth, feels like it became a book about how organisations behave.
As we wrote, ten principles emerged. They weren’t designed upfront; they surfaced as the underlying rules behind almost every good or bad spending outcome. These principles act as a lens: when you change how people see spending, the organisation’s choices shift with them.
Although this book is aimed at business leaders, these principles are universal. They expose the fact that spend is a mirror: how we approach it reveals who we are. They apply equally to public spending, social programs, charities, and households.
In fact, any system in which scarce resources collide with imperfect judgement. Early readers described the ten principles as “for the ages,” asking “who could argue” with their merit, another noted that the book treats spending as “a human challenge rather than a numeric one.”
At the heart is a simple idea. Every spending decision is a behaviour. Every behaviour is shaped by context: assumptions, incentives, and often, poor visibility. When those underlying factors are wrong, spending doesn’t generate value, it generates consequences.
The book includes stories, real-world examples, and lightweight tools that help teams see where intuition diverges from value: a matrix for separating noise from impact, a radar for surfacing blind spots, and exercises for examining what truly drives results, versus what people believe.