There has never been more money in the world than there is right now. Trillions sit in funds, foundations, family offices and corporate balance sheets — more capital, by far, than any generation in history has ever had at its disposal. And yet look at the things that actually decide our future: the health of the systems we depend on, the resilience of the communities we live in, the state of the planet we are handing to our children.
Almost none of that money is pointed there. That is the paradox I have not been able to put down. We are the wealthiest civilisation that has ever existed, and we keep starving the things that matter most.
I did not arrive at this from a lecture theatre. I arrived at it after more than forty-five years of building companies — six of them onto the BRW Fast 100 — and a second life behind a camera, making documentaries in more than a hundred countries. Both of those lives taught me the same lesson from opposite directions: money is not the constraint.
Courage is. The real constraint is a philosophy of capital that treats financial return and human return as if they were enemies. For most of my career I accepted the rule every founder is handed early: do well first, then, if there is anything left, do good.
Make the money, and one day — later, always later — give some of it back. I followed that rule. I also watched it quietly hollow people out, including, for a while, me.
The problem with later is that it never comes. The business always needs more. The next round, the next acquisition, the next jump.
And the part of you that started the whole thing because you wanted to build something that mattered gets put in a drawer and labelled one day. MAD is the argument I wish someone had made to me thirty years ago. The title is deliberate.
What the world needs now is a little madness — not recklessness, but the willingness to act as if the future actually mattered. The book moves in three acts. The first is a descent into the world as it is: systems under strain, a crisis of meaning, growth that long ago stopped meaning progress.
The second is the bridge — what I call integrated capital, an approach to investing that refuses to separate financial return from human, ecological and civic return. The third is the return: what I call the Possible Planet, a future that is no longer a fantasy because pieces of it are already being built. Integrated capital is not philanthropy with better branding.
It is a discipline. It asks a harder question of every dollar: not simply what will this return, but what will this return, and to whom, and at what cost to everything the balance sheet does not measure. In my experience, capital deployed this way does not underperform.
It compounds differently. Coherence — when what you build, how you build it and why you build it all point the same direction — turns out to be one of the most underpriced advantages in business. People can feel it.
Talent stays for it. Customers reward it. I have watched founders who thought they had to choose between meaning and margin discover that the two were never actually in opposition; they had simply been taught to manage them in separate rooms.
None of this requires you to be a saint. I am not one. It requires you to stop treating your values as a cost centre.
The next twenty years will be decided not by whether money exists — it plainly does — but by whether the people holding it are willing to point it at the things that count before the proof is comfortable and the returns are guaranteed. That willingness is the whole game. If there is one idea I would want a younger version of myself to take from MAD, it is this: you do not have to wait until the end of your career to let your capital mean something.
You can build that way from the beginning. It is harder. It is also the only version of building I have ever found that you can live inside without slowly disappearing.
The world is not short on money. It is short on people mad enough to use it well. I wrote MAD to make the case that you can be one of them — and that doing so may be the sanest decision you ever make.