Two Physics Students, Forty Years, and One Very Honest Book
There's a particular kind of friendship that survives distance, career changes and decades apart, and still feels completely unforced the moment two people sit back down together. That's the energy I felt when I sat down with Simon Edwards and Anthony Lee for this latest episode of the FuturePrint Podcast.
Simon is Technical Director at Global Inkjet Systems in Cambridge, UK. Anthony is a patent attorney based in Adelaide, Australia. Seems like they followed two very different career paths. Rewind forty years though and they were both studying physics together in Australia, long before either of them had any idea where their working lives would take them. Simon went on to spend decades in optics, digital printing and inkjet, with a stretch as a strategic consultant somewhere along the way. Anthony spent time in industry too, including working alongside Simon early on, before training as a patent attorney and building a career across photonics, computing and physics-based inventions.
So, when I asked them how this book actually came about, the answer was two old friends, sitting around a table together in Cambridge a couple of months ago, talking about life and talking about business. Complaining, a bit, about the things that frustrate them and at some point in that conversation, one of them said something like: instead of just complaining about this stuff, why don't we actually write it down?
That's how Get Your Shit Together or Get Out was born.
A Provocative Title, But A Straightforward Book
The title is deliberately provocative, but the book itself is not. What they've written is a plain, direct book about honesty in the workplace, born out of everything they've observed across their combined careers about how people actually work together, and how businesses sometimes go wrong.
Anthony put it simply: the core message is honesty. Taking a proper, unflinching look at your own situation, your own culture, and asking yourself the hard questions before you go asking anyone else to answer them.
Simon talked about a habit he's seen play out again and again in businesses: something slips, nobody says anything, and two months later someone finally mentions that a deadline was missed and it wasn't good enough. By then it's too late to matter. Nobody course-corrects from feedback that arrives two months late. As Simon put it, ‘that doesn't help anybody’.
Each chapter starts by laying out a real issue, but the whole point is to get to the next question: what can you actually do about it? Nothing overly complicated. Just a clear, honest way forward.
We got into the classic feedback dilemma too, the one most of us have been trained on at some point. Two positives before you deliver the criticism, softening the blow so to speak. Simon didn’t agree with this. His view is that softening feedback doesn't actually protect anyone. It just delays the moment someone finds out where they really stand, and most people, in his experience, would rather know now than be spared briefly and blindsided later.
But it's not about ‘tell people the hard truth and walking away.’ Simon is very clear that honesty has to be paired with support. Tell someone the truth, then immediately follow it with the direction forward, and the offer to work it out together. Anthony added something I thought was very important: before you have that difficult conversation with someone else, ask yourself an honest question first. Have you actually given them what they needed to succeed? Sometimes the gap isn't a performance problem at all. It's a clarity problem, and the responsibility for that sits with leadership just as much as anyone else.
Given that the book only started coming together a few months ago, I asked the obvious question: how on earth did they get it finished so quickly, working across two different countries and two full-time jobs?
The answer here is that a lot of it just comes down to their forty years of friendship and how they communicate with each other. Getting to the point quickly without having to include long explainers or padding. Another reason it came together so fast is that neither of them was starting from zero. Simon had years of material tucked away from his time as a strategic consultant, plus his own personal archive of notes and thinking he'd built up over his career. So there was no need to invent something new under pressure, it was more about pulling together ideas that had already been tried and tested in the real world, and finally giving them some proper structure.
They brought in a professional editor in Queensland to sharpen it, used a light touch of AI along the way, and self-published it through Amazon, Kindle, Google Play and even ElevenReader, the AI audiobook platform, which means you can technically have this book read to you in whatever voice you fancy. Simon rather likes the idea of hearing it in John Wayne's voice, and honestly, so do I!!
One detail I loved was the intentional size of the book. Simon and Anthony wanted something short enough that someone could pick it up before a flight and finish it before they landed. Several early readers have already done exactly that, reading the whole thing in a single evening. One reader told Simon he read it, took notes, read it again, and then passed it on to his dad. If you want to know whether a book has actually landed with someone, that's about as good a sign as you'll get.
Make it stand out
Has this piqued your interest? If so, you can Listen to the full conversation with Simon Edwards and Anthony Lee on the FuturePrint Podcast HERE
What Happens Next?
The book only went live on the 28th or 29th of July 2026, so this really is a brand new arrival. But Simon and Anthony have already set things up with room to grow, structuring the company and the copyright behind the book in a way that leaves the door open for what comes next, whether that's a series, a different format, or something built around consultancy and audits for businesses further down the line.
Simon heads to Australia shortly, and joked that a few glasses of wine with Anthony will probably be when the next idea takes shape. Given how quickly this one came together, this would not surprise me in the slightest...
And as Anthony said, most businesses are a mix of things done well and things not done so well. The book isn't asking you to solve everything at once. It's just asking you to look honestly at what's actually happening, and decide whether you want to do something about it.
‘Get Your Shit Together or Get Out’ is available now on Amazon, Kindle, Google Play and ElevenReader.
Links
Amazon
UK - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HBKHR38J
AU - https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0HBKHR38J
US - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HBKHR38J
DE - https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0HBKHR38J
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=OaT4EQAAQBAJ&pli=1
https://elevenreader.io/audiobooks/get-your-shit-together-or-get-out/kjp0fnpMqYK84pOXdb2n