Eric Ries

Thank you very much.

You've been listening to The Eric Ries Show.

The Eric Ries Show is produced by Jordan Bornstein and Kiki Garthwaite.

Research by Tom White and Melanie Rehak.

Visual design by Reform Collective.

Title theme by DP Music.

I'm your host, Eric Ries.

Thanks for listening and watching.

Oh, there's several ones.

Look, if you're talking about creating companies, of course, Lean Startup by Eric Ries is super important, or From Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

Those are great books.

I also like a lot of books.

Today on the Super Creativity Podcast, I'm joined by someone whose ideas have shaped how an entire generation thinks about innovation, entrepreneurship, and building new ventures.

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup Movement, author of the global bestseller, The Lean Startup, founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and one of the leading voices on how organizations can innovate, adapt, and grow in a world of uncertainty.

And in his new book, Incorruptible, Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, Eric asked a bigger and deeper question.

Why do so many mission-driven organizations lose their way as they grow? And what would it take to design companies that stay true to their values, resist short-term pressures, and create long-term value without losing their soul? So in this conversation, we're going to explore the hidden forces that shape company culture, the idea of financial gravity, what creativity has to do with governance and organizational design, and what founders, leaders, and innovators can do to build companies that are not just successful, but worthy of trust.

Eric, welcome to the podcast.

Welcome on the show.

Thanks for having me.

So, Eric, I

They said, oh, can you cut titanium? And it's like, and then you hear about this problem around fasteners.

So this is classic kind of, you know, Steve Blank, Eric Ries, lean startup, hacking for defense, whatever you want to call it.

It's this customer discovery process of saying, okay, you know, here we are.

You're saying you've got problem X, but actually...

I want to share another anecdote.

It is from, I think, was the leader's guide from Eric Ries, which, you know, is a founder of the Lean Startup School of Thought.

And he had this medtech company, which he coached.

And they wanted to expand to, I think it was the Chinese market.

So we've had decades of this now, and you've been in a position to study the performance and other effects.

And as we were talking before, my friend and colleague Eric Ries has written a whole book about how, I guess the way he would describe it is that often the financial gravity of the system we've designed for how companies operate allocate ownership and decision rights, pulls companies away from, you know, being good companies into being sort of extractive, rapacious ones.

And he blames actually systems of governance and therefore systems of ownership and decision rights for that.

So what did the data tell us at this point? So

I remember talking to an entrepreneur.

He was speaking at one of our meetings, and he had become the CEO of what became an extremely successful ESOP company, so successful that they were on the cover of Inc. magazine as Entrepreneur of the Year.

And when he first took this job, In the mid-80s, a friend of his said, so how's it going at this company, Reflexite, Cecil? And he said, well, it's pretty good.

We're halfway there.