The Lean Startup Author on New Book Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great | Eric Ries | E297

Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup — a book that has sold over 2 million copies and reshaped how a generation of founders and product teams build products. Fifteen years later, he's back with a new book, Incorruptible, and a harder question: not how to build a great company, but how to keep it that way.

What you'll learn:

• Why the forces destroying great companies are structural, not moral, and what that means for how you build

• How Saul Price built FedMart, and Costco's Jim Sinegal each solved half the problem, and why you need both halves

• How Anthropic used a purpose trust structure, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, to protect its safety mission from investor pressure

• Why values on the wall fail, and what the Johnson & Johnson asbestos scandal reveals about how incentives quietly overwrite principles

• How builders at any level of an organization can start influencing governance without a title or authority
  

Key takeaways:

• Success makes you a target: the more valuable your company becomes, the more pressure it faces to betray the mission that made it valuable

• Ethos is the real moat: the intangible system of principles that makes a company trustworthy is harder to copy than any product or contract

• Governance is not a legal formality; it is the active, ongoing practice of protecting what you built from the forces that will try to extract it

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Eric Ries

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