This year is going to be exciting.

How do I know?

Well, in 2012, a local tech entrepreneur, after attending one of my publishing workshops, sat down with me to talk about a book project he was working on–a novel for people who work in IT. He said, “It will be as big as The Goal“.

“Sure,” I thought.

The book he was referring to was written in 1984 by Eliyahu Goldratt. The Goal sold well over two million copies, arriving on the scene just as Lean was just taking off in manufacturing. It is still standard reading in MBA programs. The unusual part was Goldratt chose fiction to share his lessons about the theory of constraints, and it worked. The story was compelling and we wondered if Alex Rogo would save the manufacturing plant and his marriage with equal importance.

The entrepreneur also said he was already a published author and had written two books whose combined sales were over 250,000 copies. I ordered copies of The Visible Ops Handbook and Visible Ops Security from Amazon. The books were just over 100 pages each, black type on shiny, white coated paper. The list price was $21.95.

“Really?,” I thought. These unknown bestsellers lacked positioning and packaging in almost every way, making the outcome even more unbelievable. Success is success, though.

I told him to send me what he had written. The first 100 pages of the manuscript were compelling. There was wonderful tension. Anyone who had worked anywhere close to IT would recognize the problems. Readers would read this book.

The bet I was making with my business at the time was that there would be authors who wanted to avoid commercial publishing but wanted help publishing commercial quality books. That is what this guy was looking for. From my side, I had a good book written by an author with a track record for selling lots of books.

I said yes to the project and over the last three years, I have said yes several more times. The journey is worthy several more blog posts, but for today I have one big piece of news to share.

Today, I am joining IT Revolution, the small company that has grown out of this work, as General Manager.

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be working (even more) with Gene Kim. Anyone who knows him or has worked with him will tell you he is a gem. Gene wants to change the lives of 1,000,000 people working in IT by finding better ways to get work done.

We have made a good start. This month, The Phoenix Project, that crazy IT novel, will pass 80,000 copies sold. In October, we co-hosted a sold out event called DevOps Enterprise. And Gene continues traveled all over the world to promote the cause.

The team we have is incredible. Aly Hoffman works with Gene and the other thought leaders working with IT Revolution. Robyn Crummer-Olsen joined us last month as editorial director to watch over all of our publishing efforts. I expect there will be others who join as we continue to grow in 2015.

Gene, Aly, Robyn and Todd

For now, thanks for listening and Best Wishes to all of you in 2015!