fourforcesbook.com› Dennis G. McCarthy
Author, The Four Forces · Author, The Loyalty Link
Founder, Paradigm Group · Founder, Lumen Capital
Dennis G. McCarthy is the author of The Four Forces: What Every Young Person Should Know About Investing and The Loyalty Link: How Loyal Employees Create Loyal Customers. He is the founder of Paradigm Group and Lumen Capital, and has spent more than three decades helping organizations build stronger leadership, deeper employee engagement, and more durable customer relationships.
His career has taken him inside companies across industries, working with executives and leadership teams on the questions that matter most to long-term performance: How do you build a culture people want to be part of? How do you earn the kind of loyalty that drives sustainable growth? And how do you make decisions today that you will still be proud of twenty years from now?
Those questions led to The Loyalty Link, a guide for leaders on the connection between how employees are treated and how customers respond. The core argument is simple and durable: loyal employees create loyal customers. Organizations that understand this build something competitors cannot easily copy.
The question that led to The Four Forces came from closer to home. His granddaughter asked him how money actually grows. It was the kind of question that sounds simple until you try to answer it honestly. He realized that most people, regardless of education or income, are never taught the answer. They learn how to earn money. They learn how to save it. But the principles that determine whether money grows over a lifetime, those principles are almost never passed on.
He wrote The Four Forces to change that. The book tells the story of Ella, a thirteen-year-old who starts asking the same question and discovers four principles through conversations with the people around her: time, ownership, discipline, and diversification. These are not investing strategies or market predictions. They are enduring forces that, understood early and applied consistently, determine how financial lives unfold.
The book is written for young readers, but the parents, grandparents, teachers, and advisors who give it to them often find themselves rereading it. The ideas are that fundamental.
Dennis founded Paradigm Group to bring a different kind of strategic thinking to the organizations he worked with. He founded Lumen Capital to apply those same principles to investing and financial decision-making. Both reflect a conviction that has guided his work across every context: the answers to the most important questions are usually simpler than we expect, and the cost of not learning them early is almost always higher than we realize.
He teaches, speaks, and writes on financial literacy, investing, leadership, customer loyalty, and long-term thinking. He splits his time between Florida and Connecticut. He has five grandchildren.
A story-based financial literacy book for teens and young adults. Through Ella's conversations with a café owner, a neighbor with a remarkable garden, and her cross-country coach, readers discover the four principles that determine how money grows over a lifetime: time, ownership, discipline, and diversification. Published by Four Forces Press, 2026.
Buy on Amazon →A guide for business leaders on building lasting competitive advantage through the connection between employee loyalty and customer loyalty. The central argument: organizations that treat employees well earn customers who stay, spend more, and refer others. A foundational text for leaders focused on long-term performance over short-term results.
Founded by Dennis G. McCarthy. Paradigm Group brings a long-term, principle-based approach to organizational strategy, helping leadership teams build cultures and operating models built for durability rather than short-term performance.
Founded by Dennis G. McCarthy. Lumen Capital applies the same long-term, principle-based thinking to investing and financial decision-making, focusing on the forces that create durable value over time.
Ella's story starts with a question most adults never think to ask.