Podcasts about lean startups

You have a promising technology – but does that mean you should build a company around it?In the second installment of our listener-submitted questions series, producer Ian McLachlan is back in the host seat with Elaine Hamm, PhD, and James Zanewicz, JD, LLM, RTTP, to tackle questions about starting and building a biotech company. They explore one of the most important lessons for aspiring founders: fall in love with the problem, not your solution, and make sure there is a real customer willing to change what they are doing and pay for something better.In this episode, you'll discover:How to determine whether a technology solves a meaningful problem, has a real market, and should become a company in the first place.Why customer discovery should begin before you build the company and how early conversations with customers, investors, and partners can test your assumptions and strengthen your strategy.How founders can establish milestones and go/no-go decisions that help them recognize when to move forward, pivot, or shut a company down before wasting valuable time and capital.Starting a biotech company is hard, but for founders with the right problem, the right team, and the passion to keep going, the potential impact can make the risk worthwhile. Tune in for a candid look at what aspiring entrepreneurs should consider before turning an idea into their next company.Links:Connect with James Zanewicz, JD, LLM, RTTP, and learn about Connect.Connect with Elaine Hamm, PhD, and learn about Tulane Medicine Business Development and the School of Medicine. Learn about NSF I-Corps and I-Corps at NIH.Check out Elaine's book recommendations: The Lean Startup, The Startup Owner's Manual, Business Model Generation, and Talking to Humans.Connect with Haley Marcotte and learn about Nucleate New Orleans.Connect with Ian McLachlan, BIO from the BAYOU producer, and submit your questions for future episodes!Learn more about BIO from the BAYOU - the podcast. Bio from the Bayou is a podcast that explores biotech innovation, business development, and healthcare outcomes in New Orleans & The Gulf South, connecting biotech companies, investors, and key opinion leaders to advance medicine, technology, and startup opportunities in the region.

SummaryIn this episode, I'm joined by Moses Adedoyin. Moses is leading Venture Design & Innovation over at GuideWell, where he's testing new healthcare solutions to help patients.We discuss what testing looks like when you work in one of the most heavily regulated environments imaginable. Moses shares how his background in engineering and simulation helped shape the way he approaches testing and how his team built a lab where they could test new ideas safely before introducing them into a live healthcare environment.We deep dive into the real world practicality of using synthetic data to increase the fidelity of experiments and how that can dramatically reduce the time and cost required to evaluate new solutions. Moses and I explore digital twins, AI-assisted simulation, and how technology enables healthcare teams to spend less time on administrative work and more time actually helping patients in need.If you want to learn more about testing in highly regulated healthcare, using AI and synthetic data, then you'll love this episode.TakeawaysTesting in regulated environments requires a different path. In healthcare, teams can't always “just talk to customers” or run a quick experiment because PHI, consent, security, procurement, and regulation all shape what is possible.Synthetic data can help teams build evidence earlier. Moses' team uses synthetic data to test concepts, technology, and early value before involving real patient data, which helps reduce both cost and cycle time.Increase data fidelity as the evidence gets stronger. Their progression moves from little or no data, to synthetic data, to de-identified data, and eventually to real PHI only when the experiment justifies it. The goal is faster, higher-quality decisions, not just faster experiments. Synthetic data can help eliminate weak technologies or partners before teams spend months navigating legal, security, and procurement requirements.Synthetic data does not replace real patients. It can work well for feasibility, proof of technology, and early proof of value, but real people are still essential when testing behavior, trust, experience, or clinical outcomes.A safe sandbox makes experimentation possible. Creating an environment outside the core production system allowed Moses' team to fail faster, learn safely, and generate evidence before asking the organization to make larger investments.AI should free people to do more of the work only humans can do. In healthcare, Moses sees the opportunity in automating administrative work so clinicians and care managers can spend more time directly helping patients.Guest LinksLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mosesadedoyin/

What if your AI strategy is creating more risk than progress? John Willis joins Andrew Stotz to trace how Deming's System of Profound Knowledge shaped the way he thinks about organizations, learning, and change. From his early days building DevOps to the AI transformations he's navigating with CIOs today. Along the way, John connects Deming to fast feedback loops, explains why leaders keep mistaking a learning problem for a technology problem, and shares stories that never made it into his book, Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge.   A fresh conversation for longtime Deming thinkers and those just beginning the journey.   TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest, John Willis. John, how are you doing?   0:00:15.7 John Willis: Great, Andrew. I was just thinking, I feel like that song, like I got my picture on the cover of Rolling Stone. Like, I'm on the Deming Institute podcast. Yay.   [laughter]   0:00:24.9 Andrew Stotz: We finally got you on.   0:00:27.8 John Willis: Yeah, yeah.   0:00:30.3 Andrew Stotz: Actually been a while and I wanna introduce you just briefly and then I'll let you do a little bit more of the introduction. But basically on Amazon, a book popped up and I was just looking at the date of that. That book popped up on, for me, it popped up on September 6, 2023 on Audible and I immediately bought it and I got the Audible book and the book's called 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge. How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future'. And I immediately got it. Didn't know you, listened to it, loved it. Later you reached out on LinkedIn and we started communicating and you were kind enough to send a copy of it, which I then went through in more detail. I love the book. I really highly recommend the Audible version because it's just fun. Because the book is opening up a whole new Deming lens, a whole new way from somebody that never met Deming, and I just found that fascinating. So maybe why don't you take a moment and introduce yourself to the audience so that people know who you are, where you've been, what you've been doing and what you're doing now?   0:01:41.4 John Willis: Yeah, no, no, great. I... So, yeah, I... I've been doing technology, usually high consequence business, regulated industry, banks, retail, the biggest of the bigs, where the technology is incredibly important. Right? And I've been doing five decades of basic technology transformations, and I'm kind of the person who gets bored real easy. So I've literally gone through, like, you name it, mainframe, centralized computing, client server, distributed computing, priority systems, the Linux Open systems, you know, owned infrastructure cloud, and I'm consider one of the founders of the DevOps movement. And now today, like the cliché that I am, I've been doing a lot of organizational strategy on AI. So I don't come in and tell you how to turn 4,000 developers into AI coders. I kind of tell your CIOs to slow down. Wait a minute. So, yeah, so my day job today is I'm... I think these days finally in my life I would call myself an author first. I've written a number of books. The one you did, I had... My last book was a history of 100 history, 100 Year History of AI. And... But I'm an advisor, so I sort of... I take inbounds. I don't really look for work. Usually it's a chief of staff for a CIO who either has worked with me in the past and hey John, we're underwater with AI. Can you come in? Or they hear something I've said or I do a lot of podcasts and then I'm sort of a quasi investor. Although I probably should listen to your stuff a little better because I'm typically... I'm one of those guys that like, if I invest in it, you go short on it right away. So... [laughter] But yeah. But, yeah, no, so... But my day job today is really, is doing research. I'm actually just sure, this probably opened up a whole another discussion. Maybe later but I'm writing a book about the history of quantum computing right now and that's been just fascinating. So...   0:03:41.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:03:41.8 John Willis: But my day job is helping CIOs and large high consequence organizations try to shuffle through technology transformations.   0:03:50.7 Andrew Stotz: And for the audience there that didn't catch what you were saying at the beginning, it kind of dated you because you were talking about the song called Rolling Stone by Dr. Hook.   0:03:59.9 John Willis: Yeah, yeah, totally.   0:04:01.3 Andrew Stotz: Dr. Hook published this in about 1972. And here are the lyrics. "Wanna see my picture on the cover? Wanna buy five copies for my mother? Wanna see my smiling face on the cover of Rolling Stone?" So here...   0:04:12.8 John Willis: Totally. Yeah. There you go. Deming Institute. Yeah, no, great.   0:04:16.7 Andrew Stotz: And one of the things that I found fascinating was just how you came to Deming from a very different angle. I was lucky enough that my boss at Pepsi sent me to study with him and I did two different seminars. The last one was in 1992. So I was 24, he was 92, was gonna live about one more year. I had... I could literally reach out and touch the man and hold his hand and sit next to him. I got a great picture of me sitting next to him. And I was just a young guy with a fresh mind compared to the 500 guys behind me that were older that he was bashing at times. But tell us a little bit about how you stumbled upon this topic and why you decided to do what you did with writing the book?   0:05:03.7 John Willis: Yeah, no, it's sort of interesting. I sort of say that for the first, I don't know, probably from 1980, my first job was running five distributed large computer systems for Exxon Research and Production, basically the geophysics work, right, during the most hottest period of the oil industry. And there were people doing that part of variation and understanding, but that didn't sort of hit my world. I was supporting geophysical processing and then so I rolled into other jobs. And then probably the closest I came... So in other words, I'm dealing with a lot of these major transformations and always focusing on the meta side, like the organizational. What are the things that are wrong? How do we fix the human and technology? There's a phrase called sociotechnical systems, right? And that's always where I've been most interested. And then even I was at GE Capital and I'll say this with all honesty, I was a Green Belt, but they gave out Green Belts for Six Sigma, [laughter] right? My wife was actually a Black Belt. And... But we would do... And I know Deming hated Six Sigma and all that, but we were doing... It was all around me, right? And then it wasn't until really the DevOps age that we really... That was a major shift in my career because before everything was sort of first generational from a technology or sociotechnical system, very command control, you sort of you installed software in a certain way. There were so many principles that were being broken by DevOps. And I was already an older guy at that point, but I was learning from these young kids and I'm known as the person who introduced DevOps to the US.   0:06:52.3 John Willis: And... But so there is where we started going back and understanding... We thought everything was new. We were creating DevOps, we were doing all this crazy awesome stuff. And I remember a friend of mine, well, a good friend of mine wrote a book called 'The Phoenix Project' by Gene Kim and it's a rewrite of Eliyahu Goldratt's 'The Goal'. And I was like, oh my God. And I read all of Goldratt's books and I was like, okay, this is the way, this is the way. I've seen a glimpse of some 30 or 40 year knowledge that I was missing. And then it was an open space seminar. A good friend of mine says, "John, you know." and I'm going off about Goldratt and he's like, "You know this all goes back to Deming." I'm like, "Who's Deming?" I'm like, "I just spent a year learning everything I could about Goldratt. He is my North Star. And now you're telling me..." And he challenged me. He said, "John, I'll leave it at this. You go read Deming's 14 Points and if you don't... I know you. I know what you're gonna do once you do that." And he was spot on. That was it. I was... And I don't... I'm more into the Profound Knowledge and we could talk a little bit about my journey there. But I was like, oh my goodness, this is the real and I love Eliyahu Goldratt and I love 'The Goal' and I love all his books. But Deming was hitting... Was like punching me right square in the face.   0:08:12.0 Andrew Stotz: So to what gap did it close for you? I mean, Goldratt is very specific about the main limiting point...   0:08:23.2 John Willis: Yeah.   0:08:23.3 Andrew Stotz: The bottleneck, how do we solve this?   0:08:25.6 John Willis: So the 14 Points, sort of one of the jokes is that it's mandatory to put the 14 Points in a DevOps presentation. So we were doing that dance a little bit, but then when I got a little serious about it, actually me and Gene Kim, we did a book. Goldratt has this book called 'Beyond the Goal'. It's an audio-only book, right? And I convinced Gene about five years after he had written 'The Phoenix Project' to do a Beyond the Phoenix Project. And so he did Goldratt, I did Deming. And at that point, I knew enough about Deming to say, "Okay let's..." And then we talked about DevOps and the principles of Lean and we did... I always, when somebody says they bought that audiobook, I'm like, "Oh, you're the 15th person that bought it." right? But it sold more than that. But the... But that's when Gene tapped me on the shoulder and did that. We went to the studio. It was a highlight of my life, literally going to the studio with Gene and literally recording for a couple of weeks. And he's like, "John, you really need to write a book about Dr. Deming." And then I started building a folder. And then the crash course then or the trajectory at that point not really crash course is that you realize the 14 Points are, no disrespect, but vaguely interesting. You're like, "Okay, Mount Everest is System of Profound Knowledge." Right? Because that's the mount... And that's the one where you're like, "Okay, I read 'Out of the Crisis', I think I get it, the 14 Points make sense, but like, what is this stuff he's talking about here?" Right? And then you read 'New Economics' and it's like, "I still..." And then, so for me then, it was, I'm just one of these person like I have... And again, I'm not trying to make myself look like I'm special, but I have to learn. I can't... I'm the worst person in a... If I was in your class, you'd kick me out of your class because I'd be sitting in the front row and you'd be, "Oh no, not you again."   0:09:26.2 Andrew Stotz: Another question.   0:10:26.9 John Willis: Yeah I know just another question. I mean, I've been cut off by professors and... But the... I'm like, "All right, I got to get to the bottom of this." And that was almost a 10-year journey for me of... I had to know. Because it was clear to me that Profound Knowledge or System of Profound Knowledge was not something he invented out of thin air. Like, I had to figure out, where did he get this? And that started the genesis of how I was gonna write the book, which is the journey, 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge'. And that sort of took me into... And what that did, while I was learning that, of course, Deming opened the door to guys like Russell Ackoff and Ashby and just all these other sort of management thinkers and even Drucker or whatever, right? They all sort of started filling out a palette. But meanwhile, I'm still driving hard on Deming. And what that gentleman said to me, good friend of mine, Ben Rockwood, who I give tribute in the book, is when he said to me, almost like tapped me on the head, like, "John, John, John, it all goes back to Deming." Like, you start seeing the clarity of DevOps, Lean, Agile, it all had these things. And so I spent literally a long time really trying to figure out, okay, how did Deming get... We all know variation is relatively simple to understand where he got that from, right? Shewhart's work and all that stuff. And I'm not trivializing the impact of what he did for it, but knowledge was interesting. And knowledge I had to go to pragmatism. You had to understand what C.I. Lewis is. And that's a book that Deming said he had to read seven times.   0:12:03.1 Andrew Stotz: He had to read it seven times...there's no hope for me.   [overlapping conversation]   0:12:05.2 John Willis: That's right. No, actually I did Tom Sawyer. I have a friend who's one of the smartest people I know. He's like, "I'll read that." And he explained it to me. But and then I read it. But so knowledge, this sort of, how do we understand? How do we know what we think we really know, right? That whole epistemology and all that. To me, this is like sort of, just give me more, right? And see more and feed me. And then system thinking was interesting, appreciation for system, because then that got me back to, okay, and there was some missing links there. And I found that one of the guys who came up with General Systems Theory, von Bertalanffy, him and yeah, Ackoff. Him and Ackoff had sat in a seminar of his like in the '40s and so there was some influence there. And there's a lot of work that's been going on in systems thinking after him. But so then I got that and then the psychology is tough, right? But so I put all that together. And then my... The thing I was telling you earlier is, when I do the research for a project like this, I read everything that there is about it. So my AI book, I read 25 books on AI, history of AI. I'm up to like 10 books on the history of quantum computing.   0:13:23.4 John Willis: With Deming, I've read every book that's been written by Deming, at least the ones that I know of, right? And one of the things I noticed, the pattern was that they all... Again, I'm just simplifying it. They all started off with a little bit about the biography, some a little longer than others, but in general, most of the book was about the management theory. And it was really a book that was being sold as a business book more than it was as a biography. And one of the things I've always loved about Michael Lewis or that sort of story of nonfiction storytelling is he tells a biography, it's a disguised biography and I thought, my God this... And as I kept compiling over the years all these great stories, you know, the Doris Quinn story, right? The woman who, she went to New Guinea and Deming... Spent the last two years of her life with Deming. I mean, most of the people that are Deming disciples didn't even know about this woman. And she spent the last two years of life traveling with him. So I met her and interviewed her. And the stories, you know Hawthorne, and there was such... It wasn't just that, I love the idea of trying to explain how he got to management theory and epistemology, how did he get to the science of variation? That's all good stuff. But I wanted the stories, and the stories were just glorious. As you enjoyed the book, right?   0:14:52.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:14:53.3 John Willis: I think that was the fun part of not just explaining the sort of tech, if you will, but it was the, like the, oh my God, this... I've got to... I had three chapters like six years before I wrote the book.   0:15:06.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, here's chapter 15. And you say, "Being a student of Deming, I came across an untold firsthand account of a beautiful story from one of his acolytes, a woman named Doris Quinn," who you're talking about.   0:15:20.0 John Willis: Yeah. Yeah.   0:15:20.2 Andrew Stotz: And... But the... I also had marked a section related to talking about the final days, saying...   0:15:29.7 John Willis: Yeah.   0:15:29.8 Andrew Stotz: "Doris said he was a very, very driven man. He went nonstop. I remember one time we were in Kansas City and a reporter asked him, "Dr. Deming, when are you going to retire?" And the master said, "Why would I do that?" "Well, so you can do what you want." the reporter said."   0:15:45.7 John Willis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.   0:15:46.4 Andrew Stotz: "Dr. Deming looked at him and said, "I am doing what I want."   0:15:50.2 John Willis: Yeah. You know what I love about her? There's a really good book from Amazon called 'Working Backwards'. And they tell us... The guys who wrote it were pretty high up early on in Amazon. They tell the story how if they traveled with Bezos and you didn't have a whole set of questions on the plane ride, you got in trouble. And so Doris Quinn tells that story, how she literally, she tells the story of how she traveled with him and he's like, "Doris, what other questions do you have for me?" And if she didn't have one, he'd get mad at her. He wouldn't talk to her. They'd have to wait a day because normally they'd go and have gin together. But if she didn't have questions... And some of it's in the book, some of it was in conversations had... He'd literally get mad at her and not talk to her for the rest of the day [laughter] because she didn't have any questions. You got to love that, right?   0:16:39.2 Andrew Stotz: And you also did a little follow-on about more stories that you didn't get in the book, I believe.   0:16:48.1 John Willis: Yeah. Yeah.   0:16:48.2 Andrew Stotz: Tell us about that.   0:16:50.1 John Willis: Well, so I wrote the DevOps Handbook, right? And that was a collaboration with four other authors and took us six years to write it. So my wife says, "What parts did you write?" I'm like, I don't know, man. There were a lot of parts that went in and out and moved around when you have four authors, and it was really a very techie book. So 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge' was really the first book where I literally... It was my book. And so I had written the book. In fact, my favorite story, and Doris Quinn is a great story, my favorite one was... It was basically called The Devil Wears Prada. And so, and Kevin... I don't think Kevin, his mother even knew this when we were talking that his grandmother literally was... I mean, I think they knew that she worked for the pre-BLS, she was a statistical mathematician and all that.   0:17:45.3 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:17:45.4 John Willis: But after the war, she worked before she... I don't know if she met Deming, but she certainly wasn't married to him, Dr. Deming. She worked on the mail-order business was getting all these returns for women's sizing. And so whatever the pre-BLS was, Bureau of Labor Statistics, commissioned her to do a study. And she's the one who invented women's sizings. Because before, they didn't really have all the different measurements. So she ran a whole statistical study. And so today... So I use the whole story of the Anne Hathaway, the 14 is the new seven and all. So I start that off. Anyway, so I go to my publisher and my editor, who I love, she'd already knocked out a lot of stories, but this is the one where, "You're not taking this story from me. You're not... This one is not." And then she's so good, she'll be like, "John, let me ask you this. Does it fit the arc?" By this point, she understands System of Profound Knowledge, she's read my book quite a bit, and she says, "Does it fit the arc of System of Profound Knowledge?" "Uh, I hate you." And I took it out. And then she said, "Well, why don't you make a blog post out of it?" And I'm like, "Oh, no. I'm gonna make another book." And I took all the stories we cut out and I called them Profound Stories. And yeah, so...   0:19:06.6 Andrew Stotz: And for the listeners and viewers, you can get it on Kindle and then you can read the stories. And I think for the Deming community, that's one of the best parts about this whole thing, is just there's no great collection of stories that has an arc to it, as you said. So I enjoy that. I wanna also... It'd be interesting to understand how your thinking has progressed about Deming, because obviously you talk about this introduction phase where you got to know him, then you have this intense phase that you seem to have a knack for, then you write the book, you have all the excitement about that, but you're on to other things.   0:19:46.8 John Willis: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.   0:19:46.9 Andrew Stotz: And there are remnants of Deming that remain with you, but there's others that have fallen by the wayside. Maybe they're not as critical as you may have thought or... I'm just curious, how does the Deming thinking unfold in your life now?   0:19:59.7 John Willis: I... It's become sort of a fabric. So, and I wanna get back to that, but I do wanna say one thing... I'm so... Whenever somebody tells me the story that they met Deming, I have two reactions. One is the hair on my skin, my arms go up thinking, "Oh, I wish that was me." But then the other one is like, I'm sure he would have yelled at me and got mad at me. Because he would basically be like, "That's a stupid question, Mr. Willis." So I have this fantasy of which way it would go. But anyway. Yeah, the question around what do I think now? I think, so if you go back to the narrative, he... And it's hard not to be a sycophant of Deming, right? But I am a sycophant of Deming, but I try not to be. And... But even in the book, I tried not to be a sycophant, right? I went out of my way. But so when I say this, Deming was in my DNA before I even knew who he was, right? Like at Exxon, at GE Capital, the Six Sigma stuff. And again, I understand for people listening, oh, the Six Sigma went the wrong direction, but it originally was stemmed from a lot of his ideas. And so it was there. So it was sort of foundational, and he was the lighthouse to put it in... And then System of Profound Knowledge became the taxonomy for me for this stuff that was in my DNA. And so in one way, there is this thing where you move on to a new transformation. And we're in one right now. We've been in one. I've been in one for five years now, which is with the AI. And again, same thing for me is it's not about the AI, it's organizational behavior, organizational patterns, what is the sociotechnical science behind how do you do these things?   0:21:48.4 John Willis: But so you forget... I always say technology shifts are like fluorescence. People use the metaphor of like spring and winter, like AI winter, AI spring, and they've used it for other things than AI. And that's sort of like a rebirth. The fluorescence is good because it's like an energy. It's always rolling forward. It just gets a fluorescence bright glow periodically. And so what the problem with the metaphor works for me because the energy is there, and the energy are the patterns that are consistent. The fluorescence is the blinding effect. So back to like, did anything fall off the wayside with Deming? Yes, for a little bit. Because in 20... Basically I started playing with the early versions of GPT, the OpenAI models, back at version two, and that was like around 2020, right? Even before ChatGPT, right? So that whole experience before we started even thinking about what this was gonna look like at a large-scale bank was fluorescence. Like I'm not thinking anything about Deming from 2020 to 2023. In 2023, 2024, I start getting asked to come into some of my larger clients. And I'm following it too, and I'm sort of... I'm starting to become aware that this is becoming... In fact, I'm pretty sure in the grand scheme of things that don't matter in the grand scheme, I'm pretty sure I got first use on shadow AI, in an article I wrote in like 2022 or 2021, right?   0:23:27.2 John Willis: So I had already been recognizing there's a problem pattern here. We got the shadow IT with the cloud stuff, now the shadow AI, and I could see this steamrolling happening so... And then I started getting called in organizations, and then I still was the wayside of the Deming. Like, I didn't walk in going, "Hey, I'm gonna hit the punching bag with Deming." I was coming in trying to figure out what do I know about patterns with this fluorescence metaphor that are new and shiny, and what are the things that are old that have been relevant for the five decades and the six transform... At least six transformations I've been through that are common in everyone. And I started seeing that. And then what was funny, as I'd be writing and researching with AI, it knew so much about me that even as early as like 2024, I had loaded in my Deming book. In fact, one of the ways I learned AI is I took the 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge' and I turned it into an augmented general retrieval, or what they call RAG database. So I learned a lot about AI because I knew what my book was, and I could validate what was hallucinations.   0:24:36.3 John Willis: Anyway, but it knew enough about me. And then what it would periodically do, it would say, "Would you like Deming's version of this?" I'm like, "Yeah, I would love that." And then I... It started refreshing my memory of what the real context going back to my friend Ben Rockwood, it all goes back to Deming. And so now it's actually on the... It's more than ever, it's on the forefront because I'm being brought into major brand organizations that are seemingly failing on AI at the institutional, organizational level. And there's not a line of these people. In fact, most of them don't wanna talk to me because they don't wanna hear what I got to say, which is slow down. And I'm okay with the ones that don't wanna hear that because I don't really wanna work with them anyway. But now I'm seeing with absolute clarity two things. One is it all goes back to Deming, and all the problems that we're seeing can be classified in Profound Knowledge.   0:25:37.1 Andrew Stotz: Tell us more about that. Because for those people that... There's so many different components. When I got introduced to Deming, it was the 14 Points, 'Out of the Crisis'. And then I left America in 1992, so I wasn't there for 'New Economics'. And it... And I did other stuff for 20 years, 15 years, and then I found New Economics. It's like, "Wow, this is different from that."   0:25:53.1 John Willis: Yeah.   0:26:09.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, so between the deadly diseases, the 14 Points, the System of Profound Knowledge, there's so many parts to this.   0:26:15.9 John Willis: No, I've got... Yeah, I definitely got. And I'll tie it right back to the... In 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge', I tell the story of Knight Capital. And Knight Capital is an interesting... It was the second highest high-frequency trading, black box, latency arbitrage on the NYSE. A sysadmin made a configuration error. They lost $450 million and don't quote me on the exact numbers, but like 450 million in 45 minutes. They were arbitraged at billions of dollars. They were literally out of business with a cease and desist from the SEC. And I always tell people, like, that's the last thing you want if you have a business is a cease and desist from the SEC, right? And at that point, we would say things like the consequences are high on how you think about humans and technology. Well, guess what, sports fans? Knight Capital is a drop in the bucket of what we're gonna start seeing with AI. We are going to see these... And there's the Equifax breach, there's all the... We're gonna see non-survival. I mean, Knight Capital didn't survive. Equifax lost five billion market cap in a week and then recovered all of it, right? But I'm saying there's been some major brand recognition problems pre-AI. You're not going to be able to survive these with the power...   [overlapping conversation]   0:27:41.7 Andrew Stotz: Abilities are gonna be shaken out.   0:27:43.6 John Willis: Yeah. I mean, and the brand damage. Brand damage by the escape routes of how... I mean, let me just step and I wanna go back to answer your question. But one of the things that people don't recognize right now is the machine that we have now has infinite knowledge at machine speed, and it's probabilistic. I mean, just add those three things up, that it has the ability of infinite knowledge, something no human could even close to. So it'll make decisions, it will escape, it will figure ways out, it will try a clever way to do something that probably no human would do that could be a disaster. Right? So the consequences are incredibly high. So then now, okay, let's really dust off: it all goes back to Deming's stuff. And so to your question, I think that I would love to see, like, you write a fantasy novel about how Deming came back to the future and was sitting here listening to what was going on, and he'd be screaming. He'd be telling everybody... And this is the thing I'm... I don't scream, I'm too old these days, but like, I literally cut off a CIO real quick in my conversation. I interview a CIO, they think they're interviewing me, I'm interviewing them. And if I'm like, "Yeah, no, you know what? This isn't right." "Well, what do you mean, John? We had..." "No, no, no."   0:29:09.1 John Willis: Because I can see right away that what the CIO or the leadership is... They think AI is a technology transformation. It's an organizational learning transformation. Deming would see this and scream this out loud. And that's the part of the blinding fluorescence that we're missing. We should know this by now, right? And so all these technology shifts, they think they're technology revolutions. They're really... I mean, they go back to the basics. What are the systems are they changing? Are we understanding what variation is? How do people learn? Are people not learning? Are people... A good example is, in every organization that I travel and this has been true for almost every technology transformation, but now it's glaring. I like to simplify. I say there's three groups. Let's take AI, right? Three groups in an organization. And usually, again, I don't care about really start-ups. I do care about startups from an investment standpoint, but I don't care about them from my day job. And so this is a bank or a large retail or insurance company or manufacturing. And so the CIO is like, "We have an AI strategy." And by the way, let me step one more thing, we learned a lot in the DevOps revolution, but DevOps was never a board-level conversation and it was never a Wall Street conversation.   0:30:37.1 John Willis: AI was immediately a board-level conversation. And so the pressure on a C-level, a CEO and a CIO, is "You must do AI yesterday.", right? And so now what's happening is the CIOs are literally doing knee-jerk reactions of like, "We're gonna have... We got 30,000 employees. If we can get all 30,000 employees using AI with a 3x productivity rating, we'll have..." you know, like, oh my God. And then they say, "Make it so." And I call this the strategy versus talent systems gap. And I don't mean how talented they are, I mean understanding what your talent system looks like. And to keep it simple, most talent systems look like this, they have one group that is passive-aggressive. They don't like change. They've been doing the same job forever. In this new world, they don't believe AI works, and they're passive-aggressive about it because they know they can't say they don't want it. When the CIO says, "We must do AI." they have to go, "Oh, we'll get to it next month. Next month. We'll get to it next month." And then you have the second group in the middle. They wanna do the right thing, but they're high enough... As we know, if you work for a bank and you're in a high enough position, if something really goes wrong, you're lucky if you get fired. You could get a fine for two times your salary, or you could actually go to jail.   0:32:02.3 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:32:02.4 John Willis: Right? So that group is like, "I wanna use this, but you're not clear. There's no clarity from your... You guys all wanna do all this...   [overlapping conversation]   0:32:11.7 Andrew Stotz: There's risks everywhere.   0:32:13.3 John Willis: But we've got the OCC and there's no clarity on FDIC and like, what does this mean?" "Well, I don't know." "Well, then I'm not touching this stuff. And do you have my back?" No. Right? And then the third group is the classic, do now, ask forgiveness later group. And so you could put this all back to driving out fear. Because what happens is you've got a strategy. What is that, it's number eight, I think. I think that's right, but it doesn't matter, right? It could be nine, it could be seven in the 14 Points. So the CIO has said, "This must happen." And then, again, board-level, horizontal, vertical pressures. And then everybody's... And they're not even understanding, do they have the capability? Do people wanna do it? Does the middle group even understand the clarity? And so the first thing that you should be doing is, in the clearest sense is driving out fear. So the do now, ask forgiveness laters are fear that if they don't do it, they won't be the leaders. The middle group is pretty clear what their fear is, you don't give them clarity of what they can and can't do. And the third group is fear of changing, losing their job, "AI is gonna replace me." So that's all a spectrum of understanding fear at the human level. And so maybe that is one of the first things you should address before you actually set a grand strategy. And we know Deming has a lot of thoughts about this, and then we break into sort of like...   0:33:48.6 Andrew Stotz: Okay, so let's stop at that.   0:33:50.1 John Willis: Yeah. Yeah.   0:33:51.6 Andrew Stotz: Fear.   0:33:53.0 John Willis: Yeah.   0:33:54.5 Andrew Stotz: That is something that remains in your belief system that is supported by Deming. Did you have that awareness when you were in... Let's just think about before you came across Deming.   0:34:08.1 John Willis: Oh, oh, yeah.   0:34:08.9 Andrew Stotz: Let's say you were doing all that stuff with Goldratt and all that but then when you came to Deming, did fear come up as, oh, wow, this is obvious, or did you learn that later and you see it now more?   0:34:21.3 John Willis: Andrew, this is why you're good at your job. This is good. This is a great question. No, really good... I love questions where I have to really deep think about it. So I think that I kind of always... It wasn't until DevOps that I understood what failing was about. So just before, like the nanosecond before I'm learning what Deming's saying about PDSA and failing and how the whole structure of learning is, I had this sense, but I don't think I was baptized yet on... And to me, I'll put fear and failure in the same bucket, right? Because it's a very... They are, in a lot of senses, the same thing. But certainly I can put them in the same bucket. So I had a sense, but it wasn't until we started seeing fast fail in DevOps. So DevOps, one of the things with DevOps was shorten the feedback loop. That was one of the core tenets of DevOps. Like, instead of waiting three, four weeks, five weeks, six weeks to deliver some software, or six months, and then by the time you deliver it, you're onto... The whole group that built it is now doing something else, let's just be able to turn a line of code into a delivery now. And that was revolutionary, right? And it's changed the universe. I mean, you don't have the big AI providers today if you didn't have DevOps.   0:35:46.4 John Willis: You would not have Airbnb and Uber and all that if you didn't have DevOps. Right? So that... And that sort of realized that this fast feedback loop is really an interesting thing, right? And the fact that it is telling you fail fast because then you learn fast and then you correct fast. And you... And so right around that time, I'm doing this research on Deming and starting to understand epistemology, the theory of knowledge. And so, again, I don't think... Like I said earlier, I don't think I had the... And vocabulary's too loose of a word. I don't think I had the structural understanding. Like, I didn't know what the word epistemology meant [laughter] before I started learning Deming. So I... So it was really... There were flavors of understanding what learning was, but it was DevOps that literally sort of put it to the front of why this works, how it does. And then I got... Again, a lot of careers is just being lucky, right? I just happened to sort of tap into this Deming thing through meeting Gene, learning about Goldratt, and then having this good friend tap me on the head and say it all goes back to Deming. And so, so and then that point, then it sort of opened up the whole world of epistemology. And it wasn't until I wrote the book where I started realizing it was pragmatism.   0:37:07.2 Andrew Stotz: And did that... Does that fail fast, does that method of accelerating the feedback loop that happened through DevOps as you've explained, does that remove a lot of fear from where people would be...   0:37:19.6 John Willis: Oh yeah.   0:37:19.7 Andrew Stotz: Much more... So that all of a sudden says, "No, no, no, it's okay to fail. We'll see that in a day, in two days, and then we're gonna iterate from that." So, okay, I understand how that kind of reframes fear of failure. But then you now talked also about the idea that it's a big element that you see, everything goes back to Deming. Nowadays you see this fear. How does it connect with how you see fear today in the workplace or in organizations?   0:37:50.6 John Willis: Well, again, I think it's the same thing. I mean, I hear people talk about now that one of the big discussions right now and I always look for the anti-pattern of where the discussions go, right? There's this big discussion about AI slop, right? In fact, last year it was we were all concerned about hallucinations. And I'm not dismissing that, but like, if you know how to run AI and infrastructure harnesses and build ground truth in an organization and you understand how your internal audit works, hallucinations are not, let me repeat this, are not a problem in 2026. They are not a problem. You could make them a problem by not understanding what I just said, but they are not a problem. So today's hallucination frenzy scare is what's called AI slop. And I guarantee you in 2027, it'll be something else. But... And I'm not saying it doesn't exist. It does exist, right? But so people are sort of calibrating, what is the cost... There's this counter-reaction to AI coding, not even assistance, people are now using pure agent coding, right? And the question that I think Deming would ask and maybe if there is some divine proxy of me speaking through Deming or Deming speaking through me is that the question that people are now looking at is, "Slop is so bad, we're creating so much code, should we ease back to the longer cycle for ideation and delivery and that process?" Because it's costing us a lot of money on the implementation side.   0:39:20.8 John Willis: The error, the time it takes to remediate the slop is starting to outweigh. Well, that's just bad organizational behavior and design. But okay, but so now I've had this argument with a major corporation, the CIO the other day, where I was saying you have to create this hourglass effect. For you got to create the funnel and then you got to have the control system that slows things down and speeds it up. And he was saying, "But yeah, the cost of the slop is all this stuff." And I said... What I said is, "Yeah, but what you're missing is..." and this is a company that did really well in DevOps, I worked with them years ago through the DevOps transformation and they understood the fast feedback and I had to re-explain the idea that, yeah, there's a cost to AI slop, but if you're not calibrating that with the cost of non-fast feedback and learning because your fear is this slop is gonna get us back or make you knee-jerk reactions, we're gonna see if we can slow down the ideation, maybe we move too fast. And again, I don't... There are scenarios where that is absolutely true, but that is, first understanding your problem. And your problem isn't slow down the ideation process.  Oh, we should spend more time ideating because what does that do? It goes back to the old school where we're spending way too much time in the ideation. By the time it actually gets implemented, the feedback loop of learning is way too long. So I think you're better off at least measuring... And this is where variation comes into play. Measuring if I decrease the ideation time, do I get more value from the fast feedback because I can understand the problem, I can fix it faster? And again, that was one of the core tenets of DevOps. But I find people now pushing back because they're scared of AI slop and it's costing more remediation time. So again, I think these are multiple ways of thinking about how fear...   [overlapping conversation]   0:41:26.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, so besides...   0:41:27.1 John Willis: The fear... And I was just gonna say one... Sorry to cut you off.   0:41:29.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, go ahead.   0:41:31.0 John Willis: But one of the biggest problems I've seen over the years is I think the knee-jerk reaction is the symptom of fear. Right? And so I've seen this over and over where a bank gets pawned and so they put out a req for a hundred IT sec professionals in a city where you can best case hire 10 one year. Right? So again, I think that there's that combinatorial fear, knee-jerk reaction.   0:42:00.5 Andrew Stotz: If you were to pick one other area of Deming that really stands the test of time for you, as opposed to a Deming disciple, let's say someone that's trying to implement everything that he's talking about and they're trying to do it in their little manufacturing company or their service business, which I interview those guys.   0:42:09.1 John Willis: Yeah, yeah.   0:42:17.6 Andrew Stotz: But in your case, in some ways it's like you swam through a Deming period of time, absorbed everything and now you're on to other stuff. I'm just kind of interested about what else is lasting?   0:42:35.2 John Willis: Yeah, no...   0:42:35.3 Andrew Stotz: Just one thing.   0:42:35.6 John Willis: And I think maybe, Andrew, maybe part of a problem of the institutionalized Deming conversations is it doesn't always have to have the word Deming in it. In other words, I'm not criticizing you. I'm just saying that I see it more as it's in my DNA. It's part of how I look at things. And so I'll give you a great example. This is pure Deming, but I wouldn't think of it as, "Oh, let me explain this way I want you to evolve in AI because Deming would say..." I don't start that way. But I will tell you that when I came up with this idea and it's called an ideation, AI ideation hackathon. Right? Because everybody's running tech hackathons, AI hackathons. And that's a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. And there's technical debt, you're just making a lot of mistakes there.   0:43:01.7 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:43:27.8 John Willis: It's a knee-jerk reaction. So the ideation hackathon is sort of something unique. I was doing some consulting for the CMO of a large database company, but got into AI and I helped them, it's called MongoDB, I don't do any work for them anymore but I helped them launch their AI solution. And I did a lot of technical hackathons and I just kept seeing how all the chaos of these technical hackathons, people would build stuff, it would just wind up in GitHub repositories, it would go nowhere. And I finally said, "Why don't we just strip out the technology and focus on the ideation process?" Right? And so that becomes a pure implementation of PDSA. Right? Because in a PDSA, if I was gonna sort of explain it in a Deming way, a hackathon would be a terrible way to implement a PDSA. "So let's build the Sistine Chapel and then let's figure out, let's study the results." Or why don't we start small as an organization? This is why I tell my first... Right now, CIO asks me, "Okay, John..." and usually the conversation ends at this, "What would be your 30-day, 90-day plan, 180-day plan?"   0:44:41.0 John Willis: I'm like, "Not to have one." Yeah, but then I sort of, I talk about two ways to deal with where they're at. And I say that one is something I've done over years, was a qualitative. I do these large where I interview 300, 400 people and I use true qualitative analysis approach to interviewing people, build categories, and structurally design what the place looks like. Right? And that's very... But it's very expensive and it takes... Expensive not in the money, but the time. The new sort of one that CIOs, at least a small percentage of bite onto is, "Why don't we run some ideation hackathons?" And here's the value, you're not writing any code. You're letting people focus on learning how to ideate. Because remember I said earlier, AI is not a technology transformation, it's an organizational learning change. So let's focus on the organizational learning structures without giving any of the technology or the code. But do the hackathon, and the readouts are what you would have built minus the specific tools. And it's glorious because you actually you get to see all the stuff without expending tokens. You don't build the risks. Because anybody who tells you they can sandbox experiments in AI is lying, absolute lying. If anybody's followed the recent Open AI Hugging Face one, it was the most insane escape.   0:46:10.9 John Willis: So, and then the other idea is I don't want 30 of my executive administrators all picking their own tools and all trying to solve all their C-level bosses' problems. And by the way, there's the whole security exposure is, I've done ideation hackathons where an EA says, "I got this idea. I wanna take my P&L or my profit or whatever of some proprietary information on a spreadsheet and throw it into Claude and have Claude..." I'm like, "Yeah, no, no, no, no. Let me explain how that goes into Claude." It literally, it traverses through a bunch of internal structures that leave stuff laying around. And by the way, even though they say they don't train on your data, they have your data. Like, you don't want that data in there. So the ideation hackathon, I think, is a really good... And so I think the main point to that is, although I don't walk in the door and I think one of the... Again, your listeners, I'm like attacking your listeners basically but I think one of our problems is, we try to build our, some people try to build their skill set around like, "I'm a Deming expert. I'm gonna teach you how to do Deming and everything's gonna be great because of Deming." as opposed to let's just make the water Deming, the water, the fabric of what we do. And every once in a while it does make sense to be able to say, "Hey, you know that..." And I won't go back and say I won't lead and say, "Well, Deming tells us..." because I'm not gonna get the gig if I just go too much on Deming anyway. But I will say at some point, I'll say, "Here's the deal. We've got over 100 years of management knowledge on how to do the right things. Let's pay attention to those things." Right? And that's the Deming, that's the Shewhart, that's the Ackoff, it's the Ashby, it's the... We can go down the list, right? Senge.   0:48:06.2 Andrew Stotz: One of the things I was thinking about a while ago was, when Dr. Deming wrote 'Out of the Crisis', he was telling us that we were in a crisis and that we needed to think a new level of thinking. Did it work? Are we out of the crisis? Did people take on board what he taught? Where are we now? That was 1986.   0:48:30.7 John Willis: Yeah, I know, I know.   0:48:31.7 Andrew Stotz: On the one side you can say America's brought incredible amount of innovation and businesses are huge and other countries and other regions struggle to catch up with America. So on the one hand, you could say materially it appears like we're there. But on the other hand, when you look at the way things are managed, you could argue, yeah, not much has changed.   0:48:56.7 John Willis: It's a tough one. It's a tough, I mean, let's just face it, large-scale organizations of high consequences are so full of bureaucracy. Humans interacting at that scale is probably the hardest organizational problem there is, right? You can study anthropology for the next 40 or 50 years and still not have a good clue of how to. And people do, right? So, yeah, it's hard. And why things work, why they go through the... I mean, I talk about the Peterson at Ford, right? And then Ford, turns out there were a lot of other... There are these other conflicting things that happen, industry changes, financial models change. Why did Ford have this incredible success when Peterson called Deming? And then some number of years later, they're back to the old ways, right? We got General Motors, we got all that. I will say this, and I hadn't really thought about this until you asked the question. One of the things I did focus pretty heavy on is Deming's influence on Toyota. And now there's a lot of debate and this is where people get pretty mean with me. I mean, Dr. Spear, I love Dr. Spear. He wrote 'High Velocity Edge' and he's a genius. He was MIT Sloan. And every time I'd see him, "Well, you know, John, Deming and that Six Sigma stuff never worked." And I'm like, "Alright, first off, he didn't do Six Sigma. Second off..."   0:50:21.6 John Willis: And then he told me one time, he said that Deming had no influence on Toyota. I'm like, "Yeah, that's just not blatantly untrue. I'm sorry, you're a PhD genius, I'm not. You're wrong." And so I've been hitting him... Over the years, I hit him with a lot of evidence of Deming's influence on Toyota. And it even goes back to Denco Densco and some of the same. But here's the thing, right? I... There's a woman called Katie Anderson. She's got a book, Learning to... 'Leading to Learn, Learning to Lead', where she met a guy who spent four decades at Toyota, this Dr. Yoshino, and she interviewed and wrote a book about his career. She runs a Japan study trip. I did a Japan study trip a couple of years ago and I got to meet him. And I... He hired at Toyota in 1966. He worked alongside Ohno, Shingo. He was there. He was a junior guy, but he was the guy they were yelling at, "Do this, do that, do this." right? So he was there.   0:51:23.9 John Willis: I told him, I said, "There are people that believe in the US that Deming had no influence on Toyota." He could not believe that that question even could come up. And he told me, he said, "John...", he doesn't really speak good English, we had a translator, he said, "Let me tell you what Deming taught us. He taught us to understand data." And at first I didn't grok that, but then I started thinking about variation. And although there's a lot of people that say that that didn't carry through too, but if I look at what Agile, Lean, and ultimately become DevOps, I in that book trace it pretty strongly back to Deming's influence on Toyota. And you can't deny Lean is not the core of Agile Lean, today's Lean, right? Toyota Production Systems, to be clear. So then I would say that the lasting impact of Deming is not what happened in the '80s when the Americans started understanding what he did, because maybe that translation, maybe it had to be... I asked Doris Quinn this and she said, "Oh, that's interesting." Because I said this, I said, "Could it be that Japan influenced Deming as much as he influenced Japan?" And I think it did. And I think the point was they were...   0:52:45.6 Andrew Stotz: It was a love affair.   0:52:46.3 John Willis: And yeah, and they were more malleable to his messaging.   0:52:50.3 Andrew Stotz: Well, they were more malleable because of their condition, but they also were more susceptible because of the structure of the society.   0:53:01.6 John Willis: Exactly. Yeah, but even the sort of community structure. I'll tell you another quick story on that study trip where we visited an elementary school. And in the elementary school, they had no janitors. Every sort of public school is like this, right? They have no janitors. And the kids, they literally clean. At about 2 o'clock, a bell goes off and some kids rotate and they do the bathrooms, some people... Imagine in an American school, some ritzy parents, "My son cleaned the bathroom?" It'd be on CNN. And they rotated serving food.   0:53:20.7 Andrew Stotz: Child slave labor.   0:53:39.7 John Willis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we got to interview a couple of them and they understood Kaizen and all. So me, I start thinking about like, oh my God, this is our... Western culture is so broken because we basically teach everything that's antithetical to that. They get out of college and then maybe they get lucky and get into an Agile, Lean-like structure and we have to break it all down, where their kids come out completely in that sort of community. And we went to a lot of tier-one distributors. You could see the understanding of community and the power of it. And so what I'm saying is, what Deming was giving them saturated to have such an impact on TPS, and it's unquestionable the impact TPS has had on Lean and Agile and DevOps. And if you follow my thread, Lean, Agile, and DevOps have certainly impacted... You don't have places like Google for good or bad, Facebook for good or bad, Uber, because they could never scale...   0:54:40.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:54:40.1 John Willis: Without that. So again, I think, I really hadn't thought about this until you asked the question, is I think actually the Deming 1980s renaissance of Deming was a... Seemed like a bubble in retrospect, unfortunately. But actually indirectly, he's had more... And there's a good part of the book that tries to cover that. I do the "What would Deming do?" after he died, if he was alive and all the stuff that happened there.   0:55:06.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, definitely DevOps. And then Eric... What was his... The Lean Startup one?   0:55:14.0 John Willis: Eric Ries. Yeah, Eric Ries. Yeah.   0:55:17.3 Andrew Stotz: That also... Those two really probably did more to promote PDSA and that aspect.   0:55:23.4 John Willis: Yeah, that's right. Oh yeah, scientific method. There is a copy, and I cannot find it anywhere, there is a copy of Eric, one of Eric Ries' Lean Startup books that does attribute to Deming, and I cannot find it.   0:55:36.5 Andrew Stotz: It does or does not?   0:55:38.7 John Willis: Does. Does. He's got this thing about the 75th birthday or something. Do you have it? Because I can't find the copy, at some point I read a copy where he does a tribute to Deming.   0:55:50.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I think there's some...   0:55:53.0 John Willis: And then...   0:55:53.1 Andrew Stotz: I have the book and I think there is some reference in the book.   0:55:57.5 John Willis: Yeah, there was one, was like... It was like... I don't know if it was the 70th year, 75th year, and he... So yeah, no, I mean that directly. Lean Startup is literally... Yeah, so yeah.   0:56:10.9 Andrew Stotz: And if we think about people that are listening to this podcast, the people that I really want to listen to this podcast and I really want to get something out of the podcast is people that just don't know Deming. They've never heard of it, but they've stumbled upon it. One of the Deming community said, "Hey, you should listen to this podcast because you'll learn about Deming." And maybe they listen to a couple of episodes and it's a bit overwhelming when they hear someone talking about a lot of detail about this or that. Maybe they bought 'Out of the Crisis' and they got a chapter or two into it and they thought, yeah, that's also a bit overwhelming. What would be your message to that person who's listening right now to say, here's the reason why you shouldn't abandon it because of XYZ or whatever that message is that you've got about what they need to know about Deming?   0:57:01.4 John Willis: Yeah. I mean, I will say this, learning is hard. Change is hard, right? I mean, it sounds cliché, but, yeah, I think all of us who came into Deming, I didn't... When I read, we talked about this, I read 'Out of the Crisis', I was like, I don't know what's going on here. One of the worst things I can advise you to, I hate to say this, and this is probably anti-Deming Institute, is start off by reading his two books. You're better off going out to podcasts like this or other stories. I found that healthcare was chock-full of great stories, particularly about Profound Knowledge, of great examples. And then I went back and read the book and then like, oh my God, this is, now I get it, right? So I think a lot of things that we sort of encounter, a lot of them have... The things that are really valuable have this sort of facing counter-intuitiveness nature to them, and you have to sort of work at that.   0:57:55.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:57:56.9 John Willis: And so Deming is hard. I mean, you... If you wanna understand Deming, I would say most people are not gonna get it on the snap. And what I would say to them is, it's worth figuring out what are the parts that he says and he did and his philosophy that could become part of your DNA, 'cause that I don't think anybody disagrees on. And then... And one other sort of short story. And I love Bill Bellows and I would say listen to all his podcasts. He's an amazing guy and just incredibly insightful on a lot of, I didn't really understand Taguchi, but so I did some podcasts with him. But I remember, and I'm not calling anybody out, but he runs the In2:InThinking Group and I've been to a couple of those. And I remember one time we were sitting there and we were having a conversation around sort of a roundtable and somebody asked, as I was talking about a company, they said, "Are they a Deming company?" I'm like, yeah. And I couldn't actually get through the room that, no. Nobody's a Deming company. Like, what is a Deming company? That's the wrong question. So again, back to, you got to be careful about how you think about Deming as using his philosophy to help organizations, because the more you focus on that it is a "Deming philosophy" as opposed to these are the right ways to think about the problems, you fall into this trap of maybe getting lost. Well, that Deming thing worked for about a year or two years and now it doesn't work. Well, if you don't call it a Deming thing, then what were the things that stuck and what are the things that didn't?   0:59:42.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I just wanna remind the listeners and the viewers out there, just go to Amazon and find 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge'. For me, I listened to it as an Audible book, which was fun because I enjoyed the stories and it just reminded me to go back and listen again. And also the additional stories, which I actually hadn't bought until, I had been wanting to buy it, but I didn't. So while you were talking, I got that on Kindle. So that's gonna be my fun.   1:00:13.9 John Willis: Those are great stories. There's a story about Gene Cernan. He was the last guy to land, be on the moon. And as you go through the book, it's really interesting. I did like seven or eight... So I was in no rush to publish the Deming book. I was in a rush to do the AI book. So I would literally get to the third rev, the fourth rev, and every time I'd have more new friends point things out. And by the time I got to like eight revs and I'm like, okay, it's probably time to put this book out. But what happens is as you go with the editor, they just start carving things down. And a good editor makes the strong point, like my 'Devil Wears Prada'. But again, there were so many great stories, like the Gene Cernan one is the last guy to be on the moon, but there was a story about Tracy's Rock and it's just a fabulous story, but it didn't have any place in Deming's Journey of Profound Knowledge. It was just an add-on that sort of took you off course. But now, in a standalone book, it's a great story. So there's a ton of those. The guy who created Piggly Wiggly was this genius. Like, again, it didn't really fit in there. But as a standalone story and I even do a little bit of, like, this would have been in chapter 15, so if you read both, you get a sense. And the worst thing I can tell you, though, is I had one person, I was at a conference I was laying the book, the Profound Stories book was laying around, and I guess I came back, he was at a booth, and he read it, and he goes, "John, can I talk to you about your book?" I'm like, "What?" He goes, "I don't know." I'm like, "Oh, dude, you can't read that book without reading 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge'. It would be a terrible book if you didn't know what the premise was for where it came from." So, yeah.   1:01:59.7 Andrew Stotz: So in wrapping up, what would you like to leave the audience with from this discussion and from your journey into the teachings of Dr. Deming?   1:02:11.3 John Willis: Yeah, I think you have to start thinking about... And again, I know it sounds like I'm trying to sell the book and you're doing a better job than I am anyway but the last third of 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge' was what would Deming do had he survived another 20 years? Right? And probably nothing because he was pretty old and not healthy. But the... So, I mean, question then is, as we think about organizational behavior, what are the core things? And I think Profound Knowledge is a great way. I, again I... Again, I don't walk in and say, "Oh, we're gonna... CIO, we're gonna solve this problem by applying the four elements of Profound Knowledge." That's not how I start that conversation. But I'm certainly thinking about systems thinking because that's first and forefront. Like, how are you thinking about... Like one company recently I was with, they got... Some of the big AI providers are giving well-branded companies all-you-can-eat AI. Like OpenAI is saying, "Hey, you know..." That's a terrible idea, terrible, terrible. Because now you're just building technical debt up the gazoo, right? So again, to be able to see the forest behind the trees, what's the systems thinking effect of that? How are you learning? What's the epistemology, the theory of knowledge behind that?   1:03:39.2 John Willis: Are you applying... In the book, I tried to codify my understanding of, like, the theory of knowledge is, how do we know what we think we know? The variation is, how can we see what we think we know? The psychology is, what are the... Let's take a second and what are the blind spots? And then I think of it as a feedback loop is, are we continually like if you listen to Bill Bellows, he does a great job of sort of explaining systems thinking through the sort of vehicle of Taguchi or Ackoff but are we just continually looping through that process as, "Let's take a bigger chunk, let's take a bigger chunk, let's take a bigger chunk"? So Profound Knowledge, not so much that you have to walk in and be an expert on 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge', or more specifically, The System of Profound Knowledge. The idea is, can you use those... And the reason I fell in with 'The System of Profound Knowledge', why that was what hit my core, because I will say, out of my five decades of doing all this crazy stuff in technology, I can't think... I mean, there's a lot of cool frameworks that I use as auxiliary, and frameworks I'm using loosely but The System of Profound Knowledge is the one framework that to me beats all other frameworks because it covers epistemology, it covers understanding statistical analysis or analytical statistics. Right? Which is very important. It brings in the biases, the... All the sort of things about how people think, blind spots, and then it throws together the wrapper of appreciation of a system, so...   1:05:23.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, now you see your picture on the cover.   [laughter]   1:05:32.2 John Willis: There we go, man.   1:05:33.7 Andrew Stotz: I wanna thank you. It's a great discussion and it's long overdue.   1:05:37.7 John Willis: Sure.   1:05:37.9 Andrew Stotz: And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org and jump into DemingNext to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, which is, "People are entitled to joy in work."   1:05:42.4 John Willis: I love that you end with that.   

15 years ago, my Lean LaunchPad class changed how entrepreneurship is taught. The class is now taught in hundreds of universities worldwide and helped launch thousands of startups. But this past summer, I got thinking about whether AI killed our Lean LaunchPad class, and with it the Lean Startup and Customer Development.

Eric Ries, author of the bestselling The Lean Startup which sold over 2 million copies, joins Sir Richard Harpin to discuss his new book Incorruptible. Fifteen years after redefining entrepreneurship with concepts like the MVP and the pivot, Ries turns his attention to a different threat: what he calls "financial gravity" - the corporate governance norms and regulatory standards that can erode a founder's integrity and long-term vision even after early success. They discuss why pivoting is a change in strategy without a change in vision, how founders like Costco's Jim Sinegal built "governance fortresses" to protect long-term thinking, and why Ries founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange to reward companies that resist short-term pressure. Ries shares advice on when startups should take investment, the benefits of employee ownership and explains how trust is the most valuable asset that an organization can have. Also, his tips on how to harness AI in a better way that allows the human and the AI to be much closer to collaborators than to delegators.Subscribe to the Business Leader Podcast for weekly entrepreneur stories from founders and CEOs who've built and scaled great businesses. Join the Business Leader community for coaching, peer to peer forums and exclusive learning events. Sign up to our free weekly newsletter at businessleader.co.uk/newsletters.Business Leader is a membership community for ambitious CEOs and founders of mid-sized UK companies, designed to help them grow with purpose through strategic support, peer-to-peer learning, expert coaching, and high-impact events. Sign up for our Business Leader newsletter here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, we're joined by Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange.Eric wrote the book that taught a generation of founders how to build under uncertainty, and he has spent the years since trying to fix what happens to those companies once they grow.His new book, Incorruptible, is about a double mystery: why successful companies so often get ruined, and why a handful avoid that fate.Tommy Stadlen and Cameron McLain talk to Eric about why he thinks the best practices of modern corporate governance destroy value, why he believes a strong founder is not enough to protect a company, and what he'd change about The Lean Startup if he could go back.Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

SummaryIn this episode, I'm joined by Martin Eriksson, founder of Mind the Product and author of The Decision Stack, to talk about how organizations can make better decisions from strategy all the way down to everyday execution.We talk about the difference between speed and velocity, why empowered teams still need strategic context, and how assumptions exist at every layer of an organization, not just inside individual products.We also explore what AI changes and, maybe even more importantly, what it doesn't. Building has become drastically faster and cheaper, but that doesn't eliminate the need to understand the customer, the business, and whether or not you should be building something in the first place.If you want to learn more about how strategic choices connect to everyday decisions and how assumptions can be tested throughout your organization you'll love this episode.TakeawaysSpeed without direction is not enough. Teams can build, ship, and test faster than ever, but without strategic alignment they may simply move in different directions more quickly. Martin frames this as the difference between speed, velocity, and organizational momentum.Empowered teams still need strategic context. Autonomy works best when teams understand where the business is going, how it plans to get there, what matters now, and how their work connects to those choices.Assumptions exist at every layer of the organization. They are not limited to products or experiments. Vision, strategy, objectives, opportunities, and execution all rest on assumptions that can become dangerous when they remain unspoken.Strategy is a series of connected choices. The value of a decision stack is not just having vision, strategy, objectives, opportunities, and principles—it is making sure those decisions connect from the top down and can be traced back from everyday work.Use testing and discovery on strategic decisions, not only product decisions. Teams have become good at de-risking what is directly in front of them, but the same tools can be applied to bigger bets around strategy, markets, and the future of the business.Not every assumption can be eliminated, but it should be named. At the strategy and vision level, some choices will always remain bets on the future. Making those assumptions explicit allows leaders and boards to monitor when conditions change and decide whether the risk is still acceptable.AI changes the economics of building, not the fundamentals of product. Faster and cheaper delivery reduces feasibility risk, but teams still need to understand customer value, business value, usability, distribution, pricing, and whether something should be built at all.Guest LinksMartin's Website: https://martineriksson.com/Martin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martineriksson/Coherent & Wrong: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/coherent-and-wrong/

Neste episódio, o jornalista Thomaz Gomes conversa com Ben Soltoff, Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) Martin Trust Center do MIT Entrepreneurship, logo após sua aula sobre como construir startups de clima e energia no Energy Summit. Ben explica por que frameworks tradicionais de empreendedorismo, como o Lean Startup, não dão conta sozinhos dos desafios do setor: prazos longos, alta necessidade de capital, interação constante com governos e grandes empresas, além da exigência de medir impacto. É desse diagnóstico que nasce "Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures", livro que ele coescreveu e que adapta para o setor o framework de 24 passos desenvolvido no MIT, com estudos de caso reais de empresas em cada etapa. A conversa também passa pelas impressões de Ben sobre o ecossistema brasileiro de empreendedorismo em energia, pelo mito de que é preciso "nascer" empreendedor para ter sucesso e por que, na sua visão, substância técnica e relacionamento de longo prazo valem mais do que carisma de palco nesse setor. Por fim, ele deixa um recado direto aos empreendedores brasileiros sobre o momento da transição energética. O podcast é um oferecimento do Energy Summit.

Welcome to episode #1053 of Thinking With Mitch Joel (formerly Six Pixels of Separation). Eric Ries is one of the most influential entrepreneurs and management thinkers of the past two decades. Best known as the creator of the Lean Startup movement, his ideas fundamentally changed how founders, innovators, and established organizations build products, test ideas, and bring innovation to market. His work has shaped startups, Fortune 500 companies, governments, and nonprofits around the world, earning him recognition as one of the defining voices on modern entrepreneurship. In his latest book, Incorruptible - Why Good Companies Go Bad... And How Great Companies Stay Great, Eric turns his attention to a much deeper question: why do organizations that begin with strong values and bold missions so often lose their way? Drawing on years of advising founders and studying corporate history, he argues that corruption is rarely about bad people... it's about systems, incentives, governance, and what he calls "financial gravity," the invisible forces that slowly pull organizations away from the very principles that made them successful in the first place. In this conversation, Eric explores why mission-driven companies outperform over the long term, how corporate governance can preserve or destroy an organization's purpose, and why stewardship may be one of business's most undervalued leadership traits. We also discuss the unintended consequences of shareholder primacy, what today's AI revolution can learn from previous waves of technological disruption, and why the future belongs to organizations that are intentionally designed to remain true to their values even as they scale. It's a thoughtful conversation about leadership, innovation, governance, and what it really takes to build companies that endure. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 53:30. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Listen and subscribe over at Apple Podcasts. Listen and subscribe over at Spotify. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Thinking With Mitch Joel. Feel free to connect to me directly on LinkedIn. Check out ThinkersOne. Here is my conversation with Eric Ries. Incorruptible - Why Good Companies Go Bad... And How Great Companies Stay Great. Lean Startup. Follow Eric on X. Follow Eric on LinkedIn. Chapters: (00:00) - Introduction to Eric Ries and His New Book. (03:02) - The Journey of Lean Startup and Its Impact. (06:04) - The Dark Side of Success in Startups. (08:50) - Understanding Corruption in Business Practices. (12:11) - The Paradox of Enlightened Capitalism. (15:09) - Financial Gravity and Its Effects on Companies. (18:00) - Corporate Governance: The Need for Change. (21:13) - The Role of Structure in Business Success. (24:08) - Navigating the Stormy Seas of Business. (26:56) - Civic Renewal and the Future of Business. (28:51) - The Weight of Words: Redefining Corruption. (32:09) - Generational Perspectives on Business Values. (36:24) - Speed vs. Quality: The Business Dilemma. (42:20) - AI: A Double-Edged Sword for Society. (49:44) - A Renaissance of Mission-Driven Companies.

Der Bücher-Prompt: KI liest dein Regal – und liegt zu 50 % richtig   Was würde deine KI antworten, wenn du sie fragst, welche Bücher du gelesen hast? TJ hat den Versuch live gemacht – und das Ergebnis war halb verblüffend, halb unbequem. In dieser Folge erfährst du den genauen Prompt, siehst Carstens Live-Reaktion (er greift buchstäblich ins Regal) und verstehst, warum die Erinnerungsfunktion der entscheidende Hebel ist.   Wie dieser Prompt überhaupt entstanden ist Der Ausgangspunkt war kein Experiment im stillen Kämmerlein. Nach einem zweitägigen Workshop mit einem Führungskräfteteam fragte ein Teilnehmer TJ, welche Bücher ihn dorthin gebracht haben, wo er heute steht – in der Annahme, dieselbe Lektüre könnte ihn weiterbringen. TJ dachte kurz nach und ließ dann einfach die KI antworten. Er hatte in Claude die Erinnerungsfunktion aktiviert und wollte sehen, was das System aus Monaten gemeinsamer Gespräche rekonstruieren kann. Heraus kam ein Leseprofil, das niemand manuell hätte zusammenstellen können – und das für TJ zu 50 % ins Schwarze traf.   Der genaue Prompt – und warum Kontext alles ist Der Prompt, den TJ live ausführt, lautet: *„Nach allem, was du über mich weißt – welche Bücher glaubst du habe ich gelesen, und welche sollte ich als nächstes lesen, passend zu dem, wo ich gerade stehe?"* Klingt simpel. Ist es aber nur dann, wenn die KI tatsächlich etwas über dich weiß. Wer die Speicherfunktion in Claude oder ChatGPT noch nicht eingeschaltet hat, bekommt eine generische Liste – nützlich wie ein Buchhandlungs-Bestseller-Tisch. Wer sie aktiviert hat, bekommt ein persönliches Leseprofil, das aus echten Gesprächsverläufen destilliert wurde. Der Prompt funktioniert also nur mit Kontext – und der Kontext entsteht über Zeit.   Carstens Live-Reaktion: Der Griff ins Regal Carsten probiert den Prompt direkt in der Session aus – in ChatGPT, weil er dort die Speicherung aktiv hat. Das Ergebnis ist eine Liste mit hoher Treffsicherheit: *The Goal* von Goldratt – gelesen. *Thinking in Systems* – zumindest in Teilen. *The Lean Startup* – ja. Dann kommt die Einzelempfehlung: *The E-Myth Revisited* von Michael E. Gerber. Carstens Reaktion ist eindeutig: Er dreht sich um, greift in sein Regal mit den ungelesenen Büchern – und hält es hoch. Das Buch stand dort. Ungelesen. Die KI hat aus seinen Gesprächen rekonstruiert, was er noch nicht gelesen hat, aber offensichtlich längst kaufen wollte.   Bücher lesen vs. mit Büchern leben TJ schließt die Folge mit einem Gedanken von Marcel Reich-Ranicki, dem Literaturkritiker, der jahrelang das Literarische Quartett prägte. Reich-Ranicki sagte sinngemäß: „Bücher hat man nicht, um sie zu lesen – sondern um mit ihnen zu leben." Der Moment kommt, wenn man ins Regal greift, weil man endlich bereit ist. Carstens Regal-Griff ist genau das: Er hatte das Buch schon. Er war noch nicht bereit. Die KI hat erkannt, dass die Zeit jetzt gekommen ist – und ihm das sachlich gespiegelt. Das ist keine Spielerei. Das ist KI als Selbstreflexions-Werkzeug.   Fazit: Selbstreflexion per Prompt – sofort nachmachbar Der Bücher-Prompt ist eines der klarsten Beispiele dafür, was entsteht, wenn du der KI über Monate echten Einblick in dein Denken gibst. Kein Dashboard, kein Fragebogen – nur gespeicherte Gespräche und ein einziger Satz als Eingabe. Die 50-%-Regel gilt dabei als produktive Daumenregel: Die eine Hälfte bestätigt, dass die KI dich kennt. Die andere Hälfte zeigt dir, wo deine blinden Flecken liegen. Wer diesen Prompt noch heute ausprobieren will, braucht drei Dinge: eine aktivierte Erinnerungsfunktion, ein paar Monate Gesprächshistorie – und die Bereitschaft, das Ergebnis anzunehmen.   Das nimmst du mit: • Aktiviere die Speicherfunktion in Claude oder ChatGPT – ohne gespeicherten Kontext liefert der Prompt eine generische Liste, keine persönliche. • Der genaue Prompt lautet: „Nach allem, was du über mich weißt – welche Bücher glaubst du habe ich gelesen, und welche sollte ich als nächstes lesen, passend zu dem, wo ich gerade stehe? • ,      • 50 • % Treffer sind kein schlechtes Ergebnis – die bekannten Bücher bestätigen • dass die KI dich kennt; die unbekannten zeigen dir deine blinden Flecken. • Die KI kann aus deinen bisherigen Gesprächen ein Leseprofil rekonstruieren, das kein Mensch manuell zusammenstellen könnte – Carstens Regal-Moment ist der lebendige Beweis. • Bücher kaufen, um sie irgendwann zu lesen, ist eine legitime Strategie – die KI hilft dir zu erkennen, wann die Zeit für ein bestimmtes Buch tatsächlich gekommen ist. • Dieser Prompt gehört zur Kategorie Selbstreflexion, nicht Produktivität: Das Ziel ist nicht eine schnelle Aufgabe, sondern ein ehrlicher Spiegel deiner Denk- und Lernwelt. Kapitel: 00:00 Hook: Was wenn die KI deine Bücherliste kennt? 00:21 Woher der Prompt stammt – die Entstehungsgeschichte 01:37 Der Prompt wird live ausprobiert (Claude & ChatGPT) 03:11 Carstens Ergebnis: ChatGPT greift ins ungelesene Regal 04:19 Bücher lesen vs. mit Büchern leben – das Abschluss-Zitat     Noch mehr von den Koertings ... Das KI-Café ... jede Woche Mittwoch (>350 Teilnehmer) von 8:30 bis 10:00 Uhr ... online via Zoom .. kostenlos und nicht umsonst Jede Woche Mittwoch um 8:30 Uhr öffnet das KI-Café seine Online-Pforten ... wir lösen KI-Anwendungsfälle live auf der Bühne ... moderieren Expertenpanel zu speziellen Themen (bspw. KI im Recruiting ... KI in der Qualitätssicherung ... KI im Projektmanagement ... und vieles mehr) ... ordnen die neuen Entwicklungen in der KI-Welt ein und geben einen Ausblick ... und laden Experten ein für spezielle Themen ... und gehen auch mal in die Tiefe und durchdringen bestimmte Bereiche ganz konkret ... alles für dein Weiterkommen. Melde dich kostenfrei an ... www.koerting-institute.com/ki-cafe/ Mit jedem Prompt ein WOW! ... für Selbstständige und Unternehmer Ein klarer Leitfaden für Unternehmer, Selbstständige und Entscheider, die Künstliche Intelligenz nicht nur verstehen, sondern wirksam einsetzen wollen. Dieses Buch zeigt dir, wie du relevante KI-Anwendungsfälle erkennst und die KI als echten Sparringspartner nutzt, um diese Realität werden zu lassen. Praxisnah, mit echten Beispielen und vollständig umsetzungsorientiert. Das Buch ist ein Geschenk, nur Versandkosten von 9,95 € fallen an. Perfekt für Anfänger und Fortgeschrittene, die mit KI ihr Potenzial ausschöpfen möchten. Das Buch in deinen Briefkasten ... https://koerting-institute.com/shop/buch-mit-jedem-prompt-ein-wow/ Die KI-Lounge ... unsere Community für den Einstieg in die KI (>2800 Mitglieder) Die KI-Lounge ist eine Community für alle, die mehr über generative KI erfahren und anwenden möchten. Mitglieder erhalten exklusive monatliche KI-Updates, Experten-Interviews, Vorträge des KI-Speaker-Slams, KI-Café-Aufzeichnungen und einen 3-stündigen ChatGPT-Kurs. Tausche dich mit über 4.000 KI-Enthusiasten aus, stelle Fragen und starte durch. Initiiert von Torsten & Birgit Koerting, bietet die KI-Lounge Orientierung und Inspiration für den Einstieg in die KI-Revolution. Hier findet der Austausch statt ... www.koerting-institute.com/ki-lounge/ Starte mit uns in die 1:1 Zusammenarbeit Wenn du direkt mit uns arbeiten und KI in deinem Business integrieren möchtest, buche dir einen Termin für ein persönliches Gespräch. Gemeinsam finden wir Antworten auf deine Fragen und finden heraus, wie wir dich unterstützen können. Klicke hier, um einen Termin zu buchen und deine Fragen zu klären. Buche dir jetzt deinen Termin mit uns ... www.koerting-institute.com/termin/ Weitere Impulse im Netflix Stil ... 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In this episode of the Grow A Small Business Podcast host Troy Trewin interviews Raj Thiruchelvarajah, co-founder of Hytro, shares his journey from 15 years at PwC to building a pioneering human performance company used by elite athletes and astronauts. He explains how Hytro's wearable blood flow restriction technology helps improve performance, recovery, strength, and endurance. Raj discusses the company's pivotal shift from direct-to-consumer to B2B, which helped Hytro gain credibility through professional sports and expand into more than 400 teams. He highlights strategy, networking, resilience, and making fast decisions with limited information as essential lessons for growing a startup. Raj also opens up about the realities of entrepreneurship, including fundraising challenges, work-life pressures, and why founders must continuously learn, adapt, and enjoy the long journey. Why would you wait any longer to start living the lifestyle you signed up for? Balance your health, wealth, relationships and business growth. And focus your time and energy and make the most of this year. Let's get into it by clicking here. Troy delves into our guest's startup journey, their perception of success, industry reconsideration, and the pivotal stress point during business expansion. They discuss the joys of small business growth, vital entrepreneurial habits, and strategies for team building, encompassing wins, blunders, and invaluable advice. And a snapshot of the final five Grow A Small Business Questions: What do you think is the hardest thing in growing a small business? Raj Thiruchelvarajah shares that the hardest thing in growing a small business is managing the work-life balance, especially during intense periods of the startup journey. He explains that building a business can be brutal and demanding, requiring founders to constantly juggle business pressures, family responsibilities, and their own wellbeing. He believes there are peaks and troughs rather than a perfect balance, and founders need to accept that some phases will be particularly challenging. What's your favorite business book that has helped you the most? Raj Thiruchelvarajah shares that his favorite business book that has helped him the most is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, which he plans to reread because it powerfully illustrates that there is no playbook for building a startup—you are constantly learning on the job amid the brutal realities and hard decisions that come with growth. Are there any great podcasts or online learning resources you'd recommend to help grow a small business? Raj Thiruchelvarajah recommends the UK podcast Startup Inside Out (formerly part of Bay HQ), hosted by Amadip Palmer, as a standout resource for founders, praising it as a really strong show that delivers practical insights into the startup journey. He also values peer learning through founder groups and networks (including a sports-tech founders group he's part of), conversations with other entrepreneurs further along the path, conferences and face-to-face events, coaches and mentors tailored to different stages of growth, and revisiting classic startup books such as The Lean Startup. What tool or resource would you recommend to grow a small business? Raj Thiruchelvarajah recommends networking and cultivating a strong community as the most powerful "tool" for growing a small business. He explains that Hytro's organic growth has come from authentic relationships with pro coaches and athletes who love the product and advocate for it, creating word-of-mouth advocacy that no paid marketing can match. What advice would you give yourself on day one of starting out in business? Raj Thiruchelvarajah would tell himself on day one: "Do you really want to do this?" He would also warn that it takes far longer than you expect, they once thought they'd be multimillionaires in five or six years, but the reality is much slower. The journey is beautiful and amazing, so try to enjoy it as much as you can, even though it is brutal and will take longer than you think. Book a 20-minute Growth Chat with Troy Trewin to see if you qualify for our upcoming course. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your small business to new heights! Enjoyed the podcast? Please leave a review on iTunes or your preferred platform. Your feedback helps more small business owners discover our podcast and embark on their business growth journey.   Quotable quotes from our special Grow A Small Business podcast guest: Strategy is everything — if you're not really clear at the beginning, you end up scrabbling around and wasting your time and effort – Raj Thiruchelvarajah I don't think I'll ever feel like we've succeeded; as a founder you're always thinking about the next thing and fixing the next problem – Raj Thiruchelvarajah It takes far longer than you think — the journey is beautiful and amazing, but it's a brutal one, so try to enjoy it as much as you can – Raj Thiruchelvarajah  

SummaryIn this episode, I'm joined by Teresa Torres. Teresa is an author, speaker and a product discovery coach who I've been a fan of for quite a long time. We chat about why assumptions look different depending on the level you're working at, why showing your work is so important for alignment, and how using AI inside your courses can give students more opportunities to practice and receive feedback.We also dig into AI evals - how Teresa uses them to measure the quality of her AI coaching tools, identify failure modes, and systematically improve their performance instead of just trusting that an LLM will get it right on the first try.If you want to learn more about testing assumptions, designing better learning loops, and using AI without giving up your critical thinking skills, this episode is for you.TakeawaysAI can create a safer space for learning. Teresa found that people are often willing to ask an AI questions they might feel embarrassed asking another person.An AI coach works best when it is grounded in a clear teaching model. Teresa's interview coach was effective because it was built on years of refined curriculum, rubrics, and explicit feedback criteria.AI can dramatically increase opportunities for deliberate practice. Instead of waiting for an instructor, students can practice repeatedly and receive immediate, personalized feedback.Building AI tools can improve the underlying curriculum. When an agent struggles with ambiguous instructions, it exposes gaps in how the material itself is taught.Evals are simply a way to measure AI quality. Teresa uses evals to identify specific failure modes, track how often they occur, and test whether changes actually improve the agent.Domain expertise still matters. Recognizing that an AI coach has given subtly bad advice often requires deep knowledge of the subject, not just technical skill.Product teams should define what “good” looks like for AI. Generic quality metrics are not enough; teams need acceptance criteria and evals tied to the unique value their product is supposed to create.AI changes the role of the teacher, not just the tools. Teresa is moving away from being the expert who simply delivers answers and toward creating environments where people can practice, get feedback, and learn for themselves.Guest LinksProductTalk Website: https://www.producttalk.org/Teresa's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresatorres/

On this episode, I speak to Eric Ries, entrepreneur, multiple-time founder and bestselling author of The Lean Startup. Eric has spent years working with founders, leaders and organisations on how companies are built, scaled and governed, and later founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange to explore how businesses can pursue long-term profit and purpose. He's back with his new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, just about to celebrate its UK launch. In it, he examines why good companies lose their way, how incentives and governance drive that corruption, and how leaders can build organisations that stay true to their mission as they grow. Episode Highlights We cover a lot, including: Good companies can be corrupted by their own success - Growth, outside capital, new ownership and leadership transitions can introduce forces that pull a company away from the purpose and behaviours that made it valuable in the first place. It's always too early until it's too late - Leaders are often told that governance protections, mission locks or structural safeguards can wait. The problem is that by the time the threat becomes obvious, the organisation may no longer have the power to put them in place. Your mission statement might be a lie - If the company publicly claims to serve employees, customers or a wider purpose, but its actual governance ultimately prioritises shareholder returns above everything else, there is a fundamental contradiction between what it says and how it is built. Shareholder primacy is a choice, not a law of nature - The idea that companies exist primarily to maximise shareholder returns is relatively recent. "Mission primacy" offers an alternative: financial performance in service of a durable purpose, rather than as the purpose itself. Some corporate "failures" are successful for the people causing them - A takeover, restructuring or strategic decision can destroy customer value and weaken the company while still enriching the executives, advisers or investors involved. If behaviour looks irrational, follow the incentives. Trust is valuable enough to steal - Companies build trust with customers, employees and communities over years, but that accumulated goodwill can become something for new owners or decision-makers to extract. Leaders need structures that actively protect it. You cannot command an organisation to have better character - Companies behave more like living systems than machines. Qualities such as integrity, innovation, ownership and long-term thinking have to be cultivated through incentives, structures and repeated behaviour rather than announced by leadership. Transformation fails when leaders don't treat it seriously enough - If innovation, ethics or organisational change matters, it needs the same rigour, resources and accountability that companies already apply to finance or compliance. A speech and a workshop are not a transformation strategy. The mission has to survive the founder - Succession exposes whether a company truly has an institutional purpose or merely reflects the personality of the person who created it. Durable companies encode their principles into structures that can survive changes in leadership. Mission-first does not mean anti-profit - Companies built around long-term stewardship and human flourishing can create more durable economic value, not less. The alternative to extraction is not charity; it is designing the organisation to create more value than it captures. About Incorruptible Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great explores how companies can protect their mission as they grow, raise capital, change leadership and face pressure from investors, acquirers and other stakeholders. Learn more about the book and related work: Incorruptible - https://www.incorruptible.co/ How Is Incorruptible Going? - https://howisincorruptiblegoing.com/ Escape Velocity - https://www.escapevelocity.co/ Virgil - https://tryvirgil.com/ Connect with Eric Ries Eric Ries on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/

If you're asking when to kill a feature, you already lost.Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel break down why the "should we kill this feature" is really a trap, why the data won't save you, and why the CEO's pet project survives on rank - not merit. Our promise to you is, by the end, you'll have four questions to ask instead, and a framework for sunsetting features without extra helping of the political seppuku.Listen or watch as we discuss:• Why metrics are no good to help decide if/when to kill a feature• The "pet project" problem: some features survive on executive rank alone• How portfolio-level is the ONLY level that exposes opportunity cost• Why "ship it and see" with AI is hope-driven development, but with PR• The three phases every feature should live in: exploring, exploiting, or sunsetting/expiringFor product managers, team members, and other leaders tired of maintaining features nobody uses but nobody is willing to stick their neck out to deal with...#ProductManagement #ProductStrategy #TechnicalDebtCampbell's Law, RICE scoring framework, Lean Startup methodology, AA193 Product Lifecycle Phases, AA141 Minimum Viable ProductLINKSYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagileSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596INTRO MUSICToronto Is My BeatBy Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

In this episode of Strap On Your Boots, I explore why I've stopped treating five-year business plans as predictions of where a company will actually end up. After years of building startups, I've learned that customers, technology, competition, and entire markets can change faster than any spreadsheet can anticipate. I share how Vengo AI evolved from consumer to B2B SaaS to enterprise, why I now plan more specifically for the near term, and how founders can balance having a long-term direction with staying flexible enough to respond when the market tells them something new.

An offhand compliment from a leader becomes praise. An offhand insult becomes a verdict. Nobody in a leadership role gets to opt out of that. Three conversations from the BRAVE archive with three best-selling authors, and one thing they share: all three went and checked what everybody already assumes about leadership, and found the data pointing the other way. Adam Galinsky is a professor at Columbia Business School, currently spending a year at NUS Business School in Singapore, and the author of Inspire. He explains the leader amplification effect, why the people we call great are characterised on two dimensions and excused on the third, and what he found after asking people on every continent to describe an inspiring leader and an infuriating one. The answers were the same everywhere, with one variation: hypocrisy comes up more in Asia. Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup. Fifteen years on, he went back to the founders who used it and found many of them miserable, and many of them no longer recognising the company they had built. His argument: we taught people how to build and never how to protect it, trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business, and since 2008 the companies rated bad on governance have outperformed the ones rated good. Nir Eyal has written three books on why we do what we do. He starts with the most uncomfortable pattern in his own office hours, which is people waiting months for a call to report that the step they never did didn't work. Then the mechanism: what stands between us and what we want is not information, motivation is a triangle of behaviour, benefit and belief, and we quit because we have never separated pain from suffering. People, then institutions, then yourself. Watch the full episodes: E709 Adam Galinsky, Professor at Columbia Business School https://youtu.be/MhVfGQ8iI7I  E700 Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup https://youtu.be/8wihh7uYpRo  E706 Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked, Indistractable and Beyond Belief https://youtu.be/4eM2OOMyruA  Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/leadership-authors  BRAVE is Southeast Asia's leading tech podcast, hosted by Jeremy Au. Honest conversations with the region's top founders, investors, and operators on building startups in Southeast Asia. New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one. Listen & Subscribe YouTube (English), YouTube (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (English), Spotify (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (Chinese), Spotify (Vietnamese), Apple Podcasts Follow BRAVE LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp Follow Jeremy Au LinkedIn, X / Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Twitch Resources Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com #Leadership #SoutheastAsia #Founders #Singapore #TechPodcast #Management #Startups #VentureCapital #BusinessBooks #LeanStartup #Psychology #FutureOfWork #Productivity #CorporateGovernance #SEAstartups #Malaysia #Indonesia #Philippines #Vietnam #Entrepreneurship 00:00 Three findings that contradict what you believe 00:41 Adam Galinsky: you don't get to choose your impact 03:01 The Steve Jobs defence, and Mother Teresa 05:10 The captain of Flight 1380 07:07 Inspiring vs infuriating, and what Asia judges differently 08:57 Eric Ries: they built the companies and ended up miserable 12:09 Since 2008, bad governance has beaten good 16:31 Costco, Sol Price, and the locks that were changed 20:19 Nir Eyal: they read the book, they didn't do the book 23:48 Why visualising success backfires 26:52 Pain is not suffering 30:35 The thing nobody checked

SummaryIn this episode, I'm joined by Barry O'Reilly,  he's an entrepreneur, advisor, author and a friend of mine who works with executives to redesign how their organizations perform. He's also the co-founder of Nobody Studios, an AI venture studio building and launching over 100 companies.Barry and I chat about what he's learned from years of helping corporations experiment, redesign systems, and make better decisions under extreme uncertainty.We talk about why so many AI transformations start in the wrong place, why leaders should focus on the work before the tools, and how capturing conversations can create a kind of organizational memory that gets smarter over time.Barry also shares his lessons from building Nobody Studios and how that work influenced his new book Artificial Organizations.If you want to learn more about testing with AI to redesign how work gets done while making better decisions, you'll love this episode.TakeawaysStart with the work, not the AI tools. The biggest gains come from redesigning how work and decisions happen, then choosing technology that supports that flow.Human judgment becomes more important, not less. AI can capture, synthesize, and model information at scale, but leaders still need to decide what matters and what action to take.Treat conversations and decisions as data assets. Capturing meetings, transcripts, decisions, and outcomes creates organizational memory that can be reused instead of constantly recreating context.Better systems can outperform experience alone. Deep domain expertise still matters, but rigorous decision-making systems combined with machine intelligence can challenge gut instinct as the default.AI transformations fail when they are treated as tool rollouts. Buying Copilot or another platform does not change how an organization works unless behaviors, processes, and operating systems change with it.Leaders can accelerate adoption by role-modeling experimentation. Admitting “I don't know,” trying tools in real work, and openly sharing what works and what does not creates permission for others to learn.Start with one decision or workflow. Rather than attempting a company-wide AI transformation, pick a recurring decision or process, test a new way of working, and learn from the result.Guest LinksBarry's Website: https://barryoreilly.com/Barry's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryoreilly/Artificial Organization: https://artificialorganizations.com/Nobody Studios: https://nobodystudios.com/

What does it really mean to make a profit — and why do so many mission-driven companies eventually betray the very things that made them great? In this episode, Eric Ries, creator of The Lean Startup and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, joins Amie Vaccaro and Jonathan Jackson to discuss his new book Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. Eric dismantles the conventional definition of profit and offers a radical replacement — profit as the maximization of human flourishing — then explains "financial gravity," the unconscious pull that bends organizations toward the values of whoever holds the money, whether investors or donors. Through the origin stories of Costco and Novo Nordisk, he shows how "mission lock" structures protected both companies — in Novo Nordisk's case, preserving the research that became Ozempic and creating over $500 billion in shareholder value. The conversation closes with practical power for everyone else: a "no-courage activism" question any job candidate can ask, and why every transaction you make transmits your values. As Eric puts it: "You're not stuck in traffic — you are traffic."Related Resources:https://theleanstartup.com/ ⁠– Eric's foundational methodology and NYT bestseller on entrepreneurship and continuous innovation.Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) – The stock exchange Eric founded to support companies built for long-term value creation.Answer.AI – The AI R&D lab founded by Eric Ries and Jeremy Howard.B Lab / B Corp Certification – The certification body behind B Corps; Dimagi was the first B Corp/PBC in Massachusetts, referenced in the conversation.Novo Nordisk Foundation – The mission-guardian foundation whose governance structure blocked the merger that would have killed GLP-1 research.Sign up to our newsletter⁠, and stay informed of Dimagi's workWe are on social media - follow us for the latest from Dimagi: ⁠LinkedIn⁠, ⁠Twitter⁠, ⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠, ⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠If you enjoy this show, please leave us a 5-Star Review and share your favorite episodes with friends. Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

SummaryIn this episode, I'm joined by Mark Graban, he's an expert in Lean Leadership, Psychological Safety, and Continuous Improvement. Mark and I discuss the idea of the “smallest test of change,” a principle rooted in lean thinking that can be applied far beyond manufacturing. Speaking of manufacturing, we sort of geek out on what we've learned from being around Toyota and seeing how they work in practice, not just in theory.We also dive into why organizations reward people for sounding certain, how leaders unintentionally punish experimentation, and why psychological safety is essential if you expect people to admit what they don't know.Mark shares how he's applying these ideas to his own work by testing a new book through iterative publishing.If you want to learn more about creating a culture where people feel safe to speak up and use smaller tests to drive meaningful change, this episode is for you.TakeawaysStart with the smallest test of change - something quick, inexpensive, and focused on learning.Separate knowledge from assumptions by asking, “How do we know this is true?” before acting with certainty.Psychological safety is essential for experimentation because people must feel safe admitting mistakes, asking for help, and challenging ideas.Leaders shape culture through their reactions. Saying failure is acceptable means little if people are punished when a test does not work.Even experienced practitioners can overbuild. Mark's AI coaching experiment reinforced the need to test demand and usefulness before adding more features.Guest LinksWebsite: https://www.markgraban.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgraban/

Today on Your Daily Chocolate, Patty interviews Andrea Ratfield, a Delta pilot, single mom, and founder/executive director of Hope Filled Cafe, a biblically rooted nonprofit in Minneapolis creating meaningful, sensory-friendly employment for young adults with autism and cognitive disabilities. Andrea shares how her son's diagnosis and a Delta airport tour program for families and adults with special needs revealed the “falling off the cliff” gap after age 22 and the 80–85% unemployment/underemployment rate for this population. She explains launching the nonprofit in late 2023, raising over $75,000, and operating a colorful, non-motorized mobile cafe serving organic smoothies, cold brew lattes, and simple treats staffed by team members with autism, cognitive disabilities, Down syndrome. Andrea discusses hands-on training, the biggest need being fundraising, hopes for a future brick-and-mortar cafe, and how faith, determination, and Lean Startup principles guide her work.Episode Highlights:00:00 Meet Andrea Ratfield02:07 Hope Filled Cafe Mission02:53 Airport Tours to Advocacy04:14 The 22 Cliff and Jobs Gap06:28 Calling and Launch Story08:13 Mobile Venue Menu09:53 Hiring Training Funding12:05 Heartwarming Impact Stories16:16 Faith and Resilience Roots19:06 From Government to Skies19:49 Post 9/11 Pilot Push20:35 Faith Driven Balance21:22 Co Parenting Logistics22:35 No Regrets FBI CIA23:01 Dark Times Stronger Faith24:18 Scaling the Cafe Mission26:05 Rapid Fire Favorites29:10 Chocolate Talk and Farewell31:16 Host Wrap Up 

What happens when the moment a company finally succeeds is the moment it becomes most likely to be destroyed? Most founders assume the market rewards the better product and protects what they built. The legal reality runs the other way. The dominant theory of the corporation treats a company as a financial instrument designed to enrich its shareholders, and treats everything else as optional.That theory has a name, shareholder primacy, and nobody voted for it. It hardened in courtrooms and boardrooms about forty years ago. Founders sign it into their own charter on day one without reading the line, and by the time the gap between the mission statement and the legal purpose becomes visible, the exit has been engineered.Eric Ries, founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange and author of The Lean Startup, explains how corporate purpose disappeared out of the legal documents and what can be put back in its place. He shows why protection alone makes an extractive company worse, why independent directors are not neutral, and why a mission guardian belongs above the board rather than inside it.Beginning with the pattern he watched destroy company after company, the conversation becomes a practical guide to governance: the three-legged stool of 19th century corporate law, what actually killed Sears, why Novo Nordisk, Patagonia, IKEA and Grundfos outlive their competitors, and how the Public Benefit Corporation restores something far older than it looks. It ends on the question neither of us could fully answer. If a guardian protects the mission, who guards the guardian?WHAT LISTENERS CAN EXPECT TO LEARNWhy shareholder primacy is a recent legal theory rather than a permanent feature of capitalismHow the phrase "any lawful act or activity" removed purpose from corporate charters, and what quietly replaced itWhy structure protects an ethos but cannot create one, and what has to be real before the protection is addedHow industrial foundations, purpose trusts and public benefit corporations keep a mission alive across generationsWhy independent directors have incentives of their own, and what to look for in a board insteadBEST QUOTES(00:04:10) "A company is just a financial instrument, designed to enrich itself and its shareholders." — Eric Ries(00:14:12) "If you go to your local park, you'll find trees older than shareholder primacy." — Eric Ries(00:25:28) "Somebody took over Sears and managed to extract for himself $1.5 billion, at a time when the company lost $11 billion." — Eric Ries(00:40:09) "Who would you rather die than betray?" — Eric Ries(00:48:12) "Being a leader is much more like being a mother than a slave owner. We birth these things. We do not own them." — Eric RiesTIMESTAMPS (00:00:00) Why Good Companies Go Bad After Success (00:02:43) What Made Eric Ries Write Incorruptible (00:04:10) A Company Is Just a Financial Instrument (00:07:03) The Pill You Swallow and the Shareholder Calculation (00:15:48) The Three-Legged Stool of Corporate Law (00:19:31) How "Any Lawful Act or Activity" Erased Purpose (00:25:28) What Actually Happened to Sears (00:30:38) Stainless Steel for Organizations That Last (00:34:39) Why Foundation-Owned Companies Outlive the Rest (00:37:59) The Public Benefit Corporation Explained (00:44:40) Why Every Company Needs a Mission Guardian(00:50:22) Why Independent Directors Are Not Neutral (00:53:11) Who Guards the Mission Guardian (00:56:18) What AI Changes for Governance (00:59:58) Closing ThoughtsEric's book, Incorruptible: https://amzn.to/3S4n4BNIf you'd like to keep talking about these topics, you're welcome to join Eric's free Incorruptible community here: https://community.incorruptible.co/Follow Beginner's Mind for long-form conversations on leadership, capital, technology, and the people shaping what comes next. Ranked in the global top 10% of all podcasts, named #1 Deep Tech Podcast in 2025, and #8 Deep Tech Podcast in 2026Send us Fan Mail Join Christian Soschner for expert coaching. 50% Off - With 35+ years in deep tech, startups/scaleups, and public companies, Christian offers power video sessions. Elevate strategy, execution, and leadership. Book Now.Support the showJoin the Podcast Newsletter: Link

Dianne Penn is Head of Product for Anthropic's AI Research and Labs teams. She joined in 2023 as Anthropic's first technical product manager, when the entire product team was five engineers, and has since helped ship every model from Claude 2 through Fable, and helped incubate Claude Code, MCP, Skills, computer use, tool use, and reasoning. Before Anthropic, she helped build Alexa's AI at Amazon and, before that, traded high-yield bonds at JP Morgan Chase.In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:1. What Anthropic's early days were like2. The inflection points that turned Anthropic from an underdog into the fastest-growing company in history3. How exactly Claude got so good at coding4. The eval-driven development loop her team is pioneering5. How to find joy in AI when everything is moving this fast6. Why Claude's willingness to push back is key to its success7. Where human judgment remains irreplaceable—Brought to you by:WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and moreMercury—Radically different banking, now with Command—Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-first-technical-pm-on—Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0—Where to find Dianne Penn:• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dianne-na-penn—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction(02:31) Early Anthropic days(08:55) Big milestones(13:50) Inside the exponential(20:02) Token maxing(23:30) Anthropic Labs and the incubation model(27:30) How the research role works(31:35) How to become a top researcher(35:18) Frontier model safeguards(39:38) Hiring in the AI era(44:16) Building an eval set(47:48) Evals vs PRDs(49:55) The importance of hands-on leadership(52:46) Finding joy in AI(58:10) How Dianne uses Claude(01:01:05) Avoiding overreliance on AI(01:03:50) The constitution that makes Claude better(01:07:11) AI writing and verification(01:11:40) Where human brains will continue to be valuable(01:14:10) Navigating AI with kids(01:16:26) Alignment, the future of the PM role, and burnout(01:21:54) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com• Golden Gate Claude: https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude• Dario Amodei's website: https://darioamodei.com• Scaling Laws and Interpretability of Learning from Repeated Data: https://www.anthropic.com/research/scaling-laws-and-interpretability-of-learning-from-repeated-data• Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Pa-tokenmaxxing-how-top-builders-use-ai-to-do-the-work-of-400-engineers• Garry Tan on X: https://x.com/garrytan• Anthropic co-founder on quitting OpenAI, AGI predictions, $100M talent wars, 20% unemployment, and the nightmare scenarios keeping him up at night | Ben Mann: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropic-co-founder-benjamin-mann• Anthropic's CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-cpo-heres-what-comes-next• Introducing Labs: https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-anthropic-labs• Louis CK | about airplane Wi Fi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4BZBsHwZs• What happens after coding is solved? | Fiona Fung (Manager of the Claude Code and Cowork Teams): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-the-most-ai-pilled-engineering• The Anthropic Hive Mind: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-anthropic-hive-mind-d01f768f3d7b• How to build a company that withstands any era | Eric Ries, Lean Startup author: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-a-company-that-withstands• Fallout on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CN4GGGQ2• Fallout (video game): https://fallout.bethesda.net• Claude Tag: https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-claude-tag—Recommended books:• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071771328• How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success: https://www.amazon.com/How-Raise-Adult-Overparenting-Prepare/dp/1627791779• Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FWZZBPZB—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

In the age of AI, what is the one thing you still cannot outsource? According to Eric Ries, author of the mega-bestseller The Lean Startup and the new book Incorruptible, it is the hard work of learning itself. Eric has spent 15 years helping founders build companies, and the deepest lesson he has taken from it applies to anyone trying to grow: the real bottleneck is still how fast your own mind can learn. You can let tools build and summarize for you, but no one can lift the heavy weights of understanding on your behalf. In this Get Yourself Optimized episode, Eric shares: ✅ Why learning, not technology, is still the real bottleneck in the AI era ✅ How to escape the trap of reading summaries of summaries and go deep on what actually matters ✅ Why booking real time to think is a tool almost everyone underuses ✅ How to refine your vision without losing your commitment to it, and why morale is a resource worth guarding ✅ The surprising power of equanimity when life seems to go wrong Whether you are building a company or building yourself, Eric's approach to learning, focus, and staying the course is worth your time. Tune in!  

Fifteen years ago, Eric Ries handed a generation of founders a playbook. When Eli was in a Palo Alto-based startup accelerator in 2011, The Lean Startup felt like the only book anyone in that ecosystem was talking about. It was in the middle of a wildly optimistic moment for tech. Marc Andreessen declared that “software is eating the world,” social media was blooming, and there was a widespread belief that technology was about to democratize everything and bring us closer together. Concepts like the MVP (“minimum viable product,”), the pivot, and build-measure-learn became the operating language of Silicon Valley. This is a preview of a premium episode. Listen to the full interview on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/eric-ries But a lot of the companies built on those ideas went on to get corrupted by forces Eric hadn't yet named. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his reckoning with what happens after you build something great — and how to keep it from falling apart. Buy the book In this conversation, we get into why speed itself wasn't the problem, but treating a rising stock price as proof of health is like assuming more exhaust means a faster car. Eric explains why doing the right thing 100% of the time is actually easier than doing it 98% of the time, and how companies behave like superorganisms with their own emergent character — a point he illustrates with a genuinely mind-bending study about ants solving a puzzle that no single ant ever could. We talk about the “harder is easier” principle through stories from Patagonia and the long-term stock exchange he built as a design challenge, and why the value a company makes comes from the design of its products. And because we couldn't resist, we get into AI slop, LLM psychosis, and Eric's clear, simple antidote: never ask these tools to make you an artifact — ask them to teach you how to make one yourself. Bio Over the last two decades, Eric Ries's ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup; The Leader's Guide; and The Startup Way. As a founder, he has put his own ideas into practice with The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; the Lean Startup Co, which teaches and supports the implementation of Lean Startup; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU, where the ideas that became the Lean Startup method were forged. On his podcast, The Eric Ries Show, he talks to guests including world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives working to build profitable companies for the long-term benefit of society. Eric has served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and IDEO. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children. *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. New premium subscriber benefit: we've launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes. Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. You'll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show: Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world's best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Healthcare companies are built to improve patients' lives. So why do so many prioritize shareholders over the people they're meant to serve?This week, Halle sits down with Eric Ries, author of Incorruptible, to unpack the rise of shareholder primacy, what it is, and why he believes it's at the root of many of society's biggest challenges. They discuss the surprising history of corporate governance, the lessons behind Novo Nordisk's century-long success, and what founders can do today to keep their companies aligned with their mission as they grow.We cover:Why shareholder primacy reshaped corporate America (and where we go from here)How Novo Nordisk's unusual ownership structure may have saved GLP-1 researchThe simple governance change that could preserve your company's mission for decadesHow boards, investors, and acquisitions can slowly pull companies away from their original purposeThe founder mistakes that make mission drift almost inevitableAbout our guest:Over the last two decades, Eric Ries's ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of two New York Times bestsellers The Lean Startup and Incorruptible; The Leader's Guide; and The Startup Way. As a founder, he has put his own ideas into practice with The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU. On The Eric Ries Show, he talks with world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives building for the long-term. Check out his book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great—

Welcome to the What's Next! Podcast with Tiffani Bova.    My guest is Eric Ries, someone who has changed the way founders and companies think about innovation, experimentation, and growth through The Lean Startup. After spending decades helping companies scale, Eric has started asking a very different question: why do so many successful companies slowly become the thing they once set out to disrupt? His new book, Incorruptible, explores this.   THIS EPISODE IS PERFECT FOR…founders, executives, and business leaders who want to build organizations that stay true to their mission as they grow.   TODAY'S MAIN MESSAGE…most companies don't lose their values overnight, they drift away from them one decision, one incentive, and one compromise at a time. Eric argues that this kind of organizational corruption isn't caused by bad people, but by systems that reward short-term thinking over long-term purpose. He explains why mission, governance, and incentives must work together if companies want to grow without losing what made them successful in the first place. Most importantly, he reminds us that building a great company isn't just about scaling but about creating an organization that can stay true to its purpose over time.   KEY TAKEAWAYS: • Organizational drift happens gradually, not all at once. • A mission should guide decisions long after a company begins to scale. • Long-term value is created by serving customers and employees first. • Great companies are intentionally built to resist corruption.   WHAT I LOVE MOST…Eric's bridge analogy perfectly captures the challenge leaders face. Corruption isn't inevitable, it happens when organizations are built with the wrong materials. Eric reminds us that leaders have the opportunity to design them differently from the start.   Running Time: 36:18   Subscribe on iTunes   Find Tiffani Online: LinkedIn Facebook X    Find Eric Online: LinkedIn Website How Is Incorruptible Going?   Eric's Book: Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great  

Most founders assume that building a great product and serving customers well will be enough to protect what they have built. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and the new book Incorruptible, argues that the assumption is dangerously wrong.   In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Eric Ries to explore why successful organizations are systematically pulled toward corruption by a force he calls financial gravity. The conversation examines how short-term investor incentives, flawed governance structures, and misaligned compensation hollow out companies from the inside, often without anyone intending it. Eric explains the difference between mission-hopeful companies that merely wish to stay on course and mission-driven companies that have actually engineered structural protections into their governance.   The discussion covers why independent directors have statistically failed to prevent corporate corruption, how industrial foundation structures used by companies like Patagonia, IKEA, and Novo Nordisk produce dramatically better long-term outcomes, and why tenured voting rights could realign shareholder power with genuine stewardship. Paul and Eric also explore how the same forces corrupt nonprofit organizations, using examples from animal welfare and Eric's work with Adopt-a-Pet founder David Meyer.   Things You Will Learn: Why the most successful companies become the most vulnerable targets for corruption, and why it is a systems problem, not a people problem. How financial gravity collapses organizations over time, stripping away the qualities that made them distinctive. Why independent directors have statistically failed to prevent corporate corruption despite being the standard prescription. How industrial foundation structures produce companies that are roughly five times more likely to survive to year 50 than conventionally governed peers. Why tenured voting rights and multi-stakeholder governance could replace the broken one-share-one-vote model.   Tools & Frameworks Covered: Financial Gravity: The systemic force transmitted by financial markets that gradually pulls companies away from their founding mission toward extractive behavior, regardless of the intentions of the people involved. Mission Hopeful vs. Mission Driven: A diagnostic framework for evaluating whether an organization has genuine structural protections for its mission or is simply hoping good intentions will be enough. Constitutional Governance / Industrial Foundation Structure: A corporate governance model where an outside nonprofit foundation or purpose trust serves as mission guardian over a for-profit operating company, used by Patagonia, Novo Nordisk, IKEA, and others, with evidence showing dramatically higher longevity and financial performance. #BusinessForGood #SustainableBusiness #FutureOfFood #AlternativeProtein 

Why do so many great companies get bought, then deliberately ruined in the name of profit? That mystery is what drove Eric Ries, author of the mega-bestseller The Lean Startup, to write his new book, Incorruptible. Eric has spent 15 years helping founders build companies, and he has watched the best of the industry alongside its dark side: beloved brands acquired and gutted, founders pushed out of companies that still bear their names. In this episode, he unpacks why it keeps happening, and what a rare set of enduring companies do differently. In this Marketing Speak episode, Eric breaks down: ✅ Why learning, not technology, is still the real rate-limiting step in the AI era ✅ Why you can't outsource the hard cognitive work, no matter how good the tools get ✅ The two traits that Costco, Patagonia, Vanguard, and Rolex share despite having nothing else in common ✅ Ethos and integrity: how to give your mission a guardian that outlasts shareholder pressure ✅ Why it's always too early to protect your company's mission, until suddenly it's too late Whether you're starting something new or trying to keep what you've built from being hollowed out, Eric's blueprint for an incorruptible company is worth your time. Tune in! The show notes, including the transcript and checklist to this episode, are at marketingspeak.com/546  

Episode SummaryRecorded live at the San Diego Angel Conference finale at SDSU, Eric Ries — author of The Lean Startup — sits down with product leader and founder coach Vidya Dinamani to unpack his new book, Incorruptible. His argument: there's a gravitational force that pulls even mission-driven companies toward decay — “the making of money without the creating of value” — and the more successful you get, the bigger a target you become. Eric walks through how it happens (stack-ranking by ROI, the “what would investors want” ghost in every meeting, Groupon's two-emails-a-day spiral), why the fix has to come earlier than anyone wants (“it's too early until it's too late”), and the concrete governance moves that keep the great ones honest. Along the way: the San Diego origin story of Costco, Cloudflare giving away its best paid feature, Anthropic's long-term benefit trust, a hard-nosed take on AI, and a health insurer whose customer-service reps act like guardian angels.Key Topics* Corruption as “making money without creating value”* The gravity that pulls companies from mission to mediocrity* Costco's San Diego origin — and why FedMart died* Why stack-ranking by ROI buries the work that builds trust* “It's too early until it's too late” — protecting the mission in time* The PBC filing and binding your board to the mission* AI as a “Dunning-Kruger factory,” and how to actually use it* “Love” as an operating framework: the Devoted Health storyLinks & Resources* Incorruptible* The Lean Startup* Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE)* San Diego Angel ConferenceConnect on LinkedIn* Neal Bloom * Eric Ries* Vidya Dinamani This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit risingtidepartners.substack.com/subscribe

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introduced concepts like the MVP, the pivot, and build-measure-learn that are now so widely adopted they feel obvious. Over The post Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introduced concepts like the MVP, the pivot, and build-measure-learn that are now so widely adopted they feel obvious. Over two decades of working with founders, CEOs, and investors, Eric has observed that some companies built on those principles eventually betray the very customers and engineers who made them great. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his attempt to answer the question of whether it is possible to build a company that resists that fate. In this episode, Eric joins Gregor Vand for a wide-ranging discussion about why so many great companies lose their way, and what software engineers and founders can do today to build or find companies that are genuinely resistant to corruption. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, The Leader's Guide, and The Startup Way. As a founder, Eric has put his own ideas into practice through the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab, Virgil, a legal services startup, and IMVU. On The Eric Ries Show, he talks with world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives who are building for the long term. Get a copy of his new book Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great New here? I am a two-time New York Times bestselling author and one of the most sought-after public speakers globally, having addressed over 500 companies in more than 40 countries. My clients include Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Nike. My work has been covered in print media, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time, Fast Company, Fortune, Politico, Inc., and Harvard Business Review. It has also been featured on NPR, NBC, FOX, and multiple times on The Steve Harvey Show. Get more stuff from me: Join 200K+ subscribers on my FREE weekly newsletter: https://gregmckeown.com/1mw/ Stay in touch with me: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gregorymckeown/ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregmckeown/ X https://x.com/GregoryMcKeown Hire me to speak: https://gregmckeown.com/keynote/

Episode Summary: In this episode of the Solar Maverick Podcast, Benoy Thanjan speaks with Eric Ries, bestselling author of The Lean Startup, about his new book, Incorruptible. Eric explains why successful companies often lose their mission as they grow, take on outside capital, and face pressure to prioritize short-term shareholder returns over long-term value. He explores how founders can protect the original purpose of their companies through stronger governance, legal structures, aligned investors, and what he calls “mission integrity.” The conversation also covers lessons from Costco, FedMart, Anthropic, public benefit corporations, employee ownership, and purpose trusts. Eric also explains why the core principles of The Lean Startup remain highly relevant in the age of artificial intelligence. Biographies Benoy Thanjan Benoy Thanjan is the Founder and CEO of Reneu Energy, a solar development and consulting firm, and the host of the Solar Maverick Podcast. He also serves as a strategic advisor to multiple cleantech startups. Over his career, Benoy has developed more than 100 MW of solar projects across the United States, advised on more than 1 GW of energy projects worldwide, helped launch some of the first residential solar tax equity funds at Tesla, and brokered approximately $50 million in renewable energy credit transactions. Before founding Reneu Energy, Benoy worked in Tesla's Project Finance Group as an environmental commodities trader, where he managed one of the company's largest environmental commodities portfolios. He originated renewable energy credit transactions and worked with senior leadership to develop monetization and hedging strategies supporting the company's expansion into East Coast markets. Benoy also served as Vice President at Vanguard Energy Partners, a solar and energy storage construction company, where he developed project finance solutions for commercial-scale solar portfolios. At Ridgewood Renewable Power, a private equity fund with approximately 125 MW of U.S. renewable energy assets, he evaluated investment opportunities, supported portfolio strategy, and played a key role in the sale of the firm's renewable energy portfolio. Earlier in his career, Benoy worked in Energy Structured Finance at Deloitte & Touche and in Financial Advisory Services at Ernst & Young. He also completed an internship on the trading floor at D. E. Shaw & Co., a global investment and technology development firm. Benoy holds an MBA in Finance from Rutgers University and a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Economics from the NYU Stern School of Business, where he was an Alumni Scholar.   Guest Information Eric Ries Eric Ries is an entrepreneur, author, and leading thinker on innovation, management, and organizational design. He is best known as the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which introduced the Build-Measure-Learn framework and helped transform how startups and established companies develop new products under conditions of uncertainty. His latest book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, examines why organizations lose their founding principles and how leaders can design companies that remain trustworthy, mission-driven, and successful over the long term. Eric has worked with startups, major corporations, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and leaders across industries to create more innovative and resilient organizations. Stay Connected: Benoy Thanjan Email: info@reneuenergy.com  LinkedIn: Benoy Thanjan Website: https://www.reneuenergy.com Website: https://www.solarmaverickpodcast.com/   Eric Ries Website: https://incorruptible.co       Website: https://howisincorruptiblegoing.com       Legal services (Virgil): https://tryvirgil.com    Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/   Please provide 5 star reviews      If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and share the Solar Maverick Podcast so more people can learn how to accelerate the clean energy transition.    Reneu Energy Reneu Energy provides expert consulting across solar and storage project development, financing, energy strategy, and environmental commodities. Our team helps clients originate, structure, and execute opportunities in community solar, C&I, utility-scale, and renewable energy credit markets. Email us at info@reneuenergy.com to learn more.  

We've built an economy that rewards destroying value. Eric Ries wants to know how we got here, and whether we can build our way out. Eric wrote The Lean Startup in 2011 and helped define a generation of entrepreneurs. Since then, he's watched promising, mission-driven companies get hollowed out, and he thinks he knows exactly why. His new book, Incorruptible: How Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his attempt to name what's happening, explain how we got here, and lay out a blueprint for building something better.  In this episode, Jessi and Eric discuss: What Eric calls "financial gravity": the systemic force that pulls organizations away from their mission and toward extraction Why shareholder primacy isn't ancient law; it's a 1980s invention that was never voted on by anyone The private equity problem: how you can taste the cost-cutting in your food when private equity buys your favorite restaurant Why today's best practices are actually value-destroying, and what the data says about the alternative The Public Benefit Corporation filing: a two-page form that could change what your company is legally obligated to do Why "it's always too early until it's too late," and how founders miss their window to protect their mission The AI layoff glee: why Eric thinks companies racing to replace people with robots is slow-motion suicide How to find opportunity in this moment, even if you've been laid off, and why trust is the most underrated asset in business today Follow Eric Ries and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

What if the way most companies are run today—chasing short-term profits, cutting corners, exploiting customers, and ignoring employee well-being—is actually the opposite of what creates lasting organizational success? Eric Ries, author of the bestselling The Lean Startup and in his new book, Incorruptible, has spent decades studying how organizations can thrive over the long term while genuinely improving the lives of employees, customers, and communities. In Incorruptible, he argues that the most enduring, high-performing companies are guided by a mission that advances human flourishing and a principled ethos that shapes every decision and action. These organizations resist shortcuts, prioritize employee well-being, and refuse to squeeze customers—proving that ethics and excellence are inseparable. Eric brings these ideas to life with vivid examples. He examines 3M, where a strong corporate ethos fueled groundbreaking innovation like Post-it Notes, and shows what happens when organizations like them abandon their guiding principles. He highlights Sol Price's Price Club, a discount retailer which built extraordinary success by treating employees and customers with care, and how that culture carried forward when Price Club merged with Costco, where Jim Sinegal continued the same principles at an even larger scale. The conversation dives into why so few companies pursue this “road less traveled,” the perils of short-term thinking, and how leaders, boards, and investors can embrace principled, long-term leadership. Eric also shares actionable insights for individual leaders who want to build an incorruptible culture within their own teams—even when systems often reward the opposite. For anyone who cares about creating workplaces where employees thrive, where all people are treated with respect and dignity, and where long-term success doesn't come at the expense of human well-being, this episode is packed with insights and practical lessons. Listen now to discover how incorruptible organizations are built, why they matter, and what it takes to lead with principles, purpose, and care in a world that too often values the opposite. The post Eric Ries: Why Most Companies Are Built to Fail appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

New York Times bestselling author Eric Ries applies his startup philosophy to churches. Carey and Eric cover how to know when to take a risk, how to get past broke thinking in your church, and why the harder path is often easier.

Why the best leaders treat uncertainty as a chance to learn, not a failure to avoid.Most companies are built to grow. Far fewer are built to stay true to their purpose as they do.Eric Ries is an entrepreneur, creator of the Lean Startup movement, and author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. For Ries, innovation starts with a simple reality: nobody can predict the future. “If you're going to do something fundamentally new,” he says, “how are we supposed to forecast” what success will look like? Instead of relying on certainty, leaders should focus on learning. “If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Ries and host Matt Abrahams explore how leaders can communicate through uncertainty, turn setbacks into valuable insights, and build cultures rooted in trust. From the power of the build-measure-learn feedback loop to the importance of making “deposits” in a company's culture bank, Ries shares practical strategies for creating organizations that innovate, adapt, and stay true to their values as they grow.To listen to the extended Deep Thinks version of this episode, please visit FasterSmarter.io/premium.Episode Reference Links:Eric RiesEric's Book: IncorruptibleEp.56 Lean Messaging: How Simple Messages Really StickEp.54 Leadership and Ethics: How to Communicate Your Core Values  Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> hello@fastersmarter.ioEpisode Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedIn Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction (02:21) - Lean Startup Fundamentals (04:03) - Business Plans vs. Reality (06:31) - Learning from Failure (08:11) - Why Companies Go Bad (10:49) - The Culture Bank (13:51) - The Final Three Questions (22:05) - Conclusion ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Unleash your Superhuman potential with AI that meets you where you work. Learn more at superhuman.comJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

Eric Ries of the Lean Startup joins Nick to discuss The Hyper-Scaler CEO Whisperer and Founder of the Lean Startup Movement on Incorruptible Startups, Building to Thrive and Survive, and Creating a Governance Fortress. In this episode we cover: The Concept Behind "Incorruptible" The Story of Saul Price and FedMart The Governance Fortress and Legal Structures The Role of Mission-Driven Companies The Case of Novo Nordisk Advice for Founders The Importance of Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship Eric's Approach to Advice Guest Links: Eric's LinkedIn Eric's X Eric's Newsletter  Eric's Podcast The host of The Full Ratchet is Nick Moran of New Stack Ventures, a venture capital firm committed to investing in founders outside of the Bay Area. We're proud to partner with Ramp, the modern finance automation platform. Book a demo and get $150—no strings attached.   Want to keep up to date with The Full Ratchet? Follow us on social. You can learn more about New Stack Ventures by visiting our LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer welcomes Eric Ries, the renowned author of The Lean Startup and his latest book, Incorruptible. Together, they explore the complexities of building sustainable organizations that resist the corrosive forces of financial gravity and short-term thinking. Eric shares compelling stories of well-intentioned founders whose visions were undermined by systemic pressures, revealing the hidden incentives that can lead companies astray. Listeners will gain insights into the concept of financial gravity and how it shapes behavior within organizations, often pulling them away from their original missions. Eric discusses the importance of aligning corporate governance with values that prioritize long-term success over immediate profits. He also highlights innovative companies that have successfully navigated these challenges by implementing structures designed to promote integrity and mission alignment. This episode is essential for founders, leaders, and anyone interested in creating organizations that can thrive sustainably. Eric's insights will inspire you to rethink the rules of the game and consider how you can build a company that remains true to its values while achieving lasting success. In this episode: Understand the concept of financial gravity and its impact on organizational behavior. Learn about the systemic pressures that can lead well-intentioned founders astray. Explore the importance of aligning corporate governance with long-term values. Discover examples of companies successfully resisting financial gravity. Gain actionable insights on how to build a sustainable and mission-driven organization. Get important links, top recommended books and episodes, and a full transcript at thebrainybusiness.com/XXX. Get important links, top recommended books and episodes, and a full transcript at thebrainybusiness.com/XXX. Looking to explore applications of behavioral economics further?  Learn With Us on our website. Subscribe to Melina's Newsletter Brainy Bites.  Let's connect: Send Us a Message Follow Melina on LinkedIn The Brainy Business on Youtube The Brainy Business on Instagram Learn With Us on our website. Subscribe to Melina's Newsletter Brainy Bites. 

How small business owners can build mission-driven companies that earn trust, create long-term value, and avoid the traps that cause good businesses to lose their way. Show Notes Page: https://www.thehowofbusiness.com/609-eric-ries-incorruptible/ What causes good companies to go bad? According to Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and his new book Incorruptible, it often begins when organizations lose sight of their true mission and start making decisions based solely on short-term financial results. In this episode, Henry Lopez speaks with Eric Ries about how entrepreneurs can build businesses that stay true to their purpose as they grow. Eric shares why mission is much more than a statement on a wall, how trust becomes a powerful competitive advantage, and why governance structures matter even for small businesses. They discuss real-world examples from companies like Cloudflare, Patagonia, Costco, and Taylor Guitars, exploring how organizations can make principled decisions that strengthen trust and create long-term value. Eric also explains why profit is often misunderstood and how business owners can think differently about profitability, purpose, and organizational longevity. The conversation concludes with Eric's thoughts on how AI is accelerating entrepreneurship and why founders who move quickly, learn rapidly, and remain grounded in their mission will be best positioned for the future. Whether you're launching a startup, leading a growing company, or planning for succession, this episode offers valuable insights on building a business that endures. Eric Ries is an entrepreneur, author, and creator of the Lean Startup methodology. His work on innovation, entrepreneurship, governance, and long-term company building has influenced founders and business leaders around the world. He is the bestselling author of The Lean Startup, The Startup Way, and Incorruptible. This episode is hosted by Henry Lopez. The How of Business podcast focuses on helping you start, run, grow and exit your small business. The How of Business is a top-rated podcast for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Find the best podcast, small business coaching, resources and trusted service partners for small business owners and entrepreneurs at our website https://TheHowOfBusiness.com

Eric Ries, who helped so many entrepreneurs build phenomenally successful businesses based on his Lean Startup philosophy, is back with a new book called Incorruptible. The book explains why some companies succeed over the long term, while others wither. I asked him to tell us the stories of the AI companies he’s worked with and studied, and talk about how he used AI help him research his book. Eric Ries is the entrepreneur and author behind The Lean Startup, one of the most influential startup books of the last decade. He has advised founders and companies around the world on innovation, long-term thinking, and organizational design, and he also helped shape governance structures for mission-driven AI companies like Anthropic. Sponsored byZapier More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

This week on the Do Good to Lead Well podcast, I sit down with bestselling author Eric Ries for a timely and thought-provoking conversation about leadership, mission, and the growing crisis of short-term thinking in business.Eric first transformed the entrepreneurial world with The Lean Startup. In his latest book, Incorruptible, he tackles a new challenge: why so many organizations lose sight of their purpose, compromise their values, and drift away from the very mission that made them successful in the first place.Together, we explore why many traditional business “best practices” are no longer serving leaders, employees, or society — and what it takes to build organizations that can withstand the pressures of short-term performance, protect trust, and stay anchored in their values over time.Through powerful stories, real-world examples, and surprising data, listeners learn how organizations can defend their mission, outlast competitors, and resist the economic “gravity” that pulls so many companies into compromise. From redefining profit as human flourishing to making trust and love into competitive advantages, the episode offers a blueprint for building companies that not only succeed financially, but endure.Whether you're a founder determined to preserve your mission, or an executive seeking to build a culture of integrity, this episode is packed with practical guidance and inspiration. Tune in to discover what it truly means to become an incorruptible force for the good of your business and the good of humanity.What You'll Learn- The perils of “best practices.”- Corruption isn't just a crime – It's losing your purpose.- How the moral logic of capitalism has been lost.- Redefining profit: Maximizing human flourishing.- Mission (not money) makes companies endure.- Trust and love are competitive advantages.- Governance isn't boring. It's your organization's DNA.- Does growth kill mission? The risk is real. The reality does not have to be.- You can build incorruptible companies: An evidence-based business case.Podcast Timestamps(00:00) - A Special Topic and Guest(01:49) - From the Lean Start-up to Incorruptible(04:07) - Defining and Diagnosing Corruption(08:32) - The Moral Logic of Capitalism and Value Creation(13:03) - Redefining Profit and Human Flourishing(19:15) - Mission Drift and Protecting Organizational Purpose(22:01) - Outliers: Exceptional Companies and New Best Practices(25:29) - Financial Gravity, Longevity, and Employee Ownership(30:00) - Trust as Organizational Currency(34:23) - The Long Term Stock Exchange and Long-Termism(35:20) - Love, People-First Leadership, and Real Competitive Advantage(41:23) - Governance, Board Dynamics, and Creating Incorruptible Organizations(44:46) - Lessons from Case Studies: Zita Cobb and Beyond(49:16) - Closing Reflections and Practical ResourcesKEYWORDSPositive Leadership, Incorruptible, Integrity, Do Good to Lead Well, Long Term Thinking, Effective Governance, Market Reform, Lean Startup Method, Company Culture, Avoiding Short Term Thinking, Corruption, Capitalism, Value Creation, Shareholder Primacy, Business Ethics, Corporate Mission, Profit Redefinition, Human Flourishing, Stakeholder Alignment, Organizational Trust, Financial Gravity, Mission Controlled Companies, Organizational Character, CEO Success

In an era of relentless pressure for quarterly growth, is it even possible for a large brand to stay true to its core mission, or is compromising a brand's values just an inevitable part of achieving scale?Agility requires more than just reacting quickly to market changes. It requires a resilient, long-term mission that acts as a north star, ensuring that every pivot and experiment builds enduring value, not just short-term gains.Today, we're going to talk about the tension that every marketing leader feels: the conflict between the relentless demand for measurable, short-term results and the need to build a brand with a durable, long-term mission. We'll explore how the very systems designed to measure success can sometimes corrupt a company's purpose, and how a new definition of value can create a strategic advantage that outlasts fleeting market trends.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup, and the new book, Incorruptible. About Eric Ries Over the last two decades, Eric Ries's ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup; The Leader's Guide; and The Startup Way. As a founder, he has put his own ideas into practice with The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; the Lean Startup Co, which teaches and supports the implementation of Lean Startup; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU, where the ideas that became the Lean Startup method were forged. On his podcast, The Eric Ries Show, he talks to guests including world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives working to build profitable companies for the long-term benefit of society. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children. Eric Ries on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/ ---------- Resources ---------- The Lean Startup: https://www.leanstartup.co The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703 Get Incorruptible by Eric Ries: https://amzn.to/4dERCRyDrive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for Retail and Brand marketers. Learn more at CRMC 2026, June 1-3. https://aglbrnd.co/r/d15ec37a537c0d74 We're proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://advertalize.com/r/491818c79fb1873fDon't miss We Make Future - the International Festival of Innovation in AI, Tech, and Digital Marketing, June 24-26 in Bologna. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/c80991afff416bb2The most influential minds in software, AI, and engineering leadership will be at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, September 23-25 in San Jose. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/60a7299222a7bcf1 Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3 Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey friends, Chase here Eric Ries is back on the show, and this conversation goes far beyond startups, venture capital, or the mechanics of building a company. You probably know Eric as the author of The Lean Startup, the book that changed how founders, creators, entrepreneurs, and teams think about building something new. His work helped popularize ideas like continuous innovation, validated learning, experimentation, and staying close to the customer instead of getting lost in theory, ego, or endless planning. But this episode is not just about how to start something. It's about how to protect the thing you've built once it starts working. Eric's new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great, asks a question that feels especially urgent for creators, entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders right now: How do you build something that can grow without being captured, corrupted, or hollowed out? That question matters whether you're running a company, building a personal brand, growing a creative practice, launching a product, choosing clients, working with sponsors, or trying to do work that actually reflects your values. Because success is not neutral. Success brings attention, opportunity, money, investors, partners, platforms, algorithms, expectations, incentives, shortcuts, and people who may not share the reason you started in the first place. One of Eric's most powerful lines in this conversation is this: "Success is not a source of strength. It is a liability, because success attracts predators." That idea is the center of this episode. If you've ever built something that started to work, you know exactly what he means. The thing that made your work powerful can become the thing other people want to capture. The trust you built can become something others want to monetize. The values that made your community believe in you can suddenly feel inconvenient when there's more money on the table. This conversation is about how to stay awake in the middle of that pressure. We talk about defining what you stand for, making decisions before the pressure arrives, treating trust as an asset, saying no to misaligned opportunities, and building something that can grow without losing its soul. Why This Conversation Matters Right Now We are living in a strange moment for creators and entrepreneurs. On one hand, there has never been more opportunity. An individual with a laptop, a camera, a newsletter, a product, an idea, or a point of view can reach people directly. You can build an audience, launch a business, compete with massive companies, and create a brand around your name, your work, your taste, your values, and your trust. That is extraordinary, but it also comes with a real cost. The forces shaping our work have never been more intense. Platforms reward outrage. Algorithms reward simplification. Investors reward speed. Markets reward extraction. The pressure to be louder, faster, more polarizing, more optimized, and more "growth-minded" is everywhere. Eric describes this pressure as a kind of gravity. It is the gravity of platforms, incentives, success, and other people's definitions of winning. If we are not conscious of those forces, they shape us without our permission. That is one of the biggest themes in this episode: you are always being shaped by the systems you participate in. The question is whether you are awake enough to notice, honest enough to name it, and disciplined enough to choose a different path when the incentives start pulling you away from who you actually want to be. What We Explore in This Episode Why success can become a liability when it attracts people, money, platforms, and incentives that want to capture what you've built. How creators get shaped by platforms and why the algorithm can quietly tune your voice, values, and identity toward whatever gets the most engagement. Why trust may be the most valuable asset in business and why it is so easy to destroy with one short-term decision. How to define an ethos before outside pressure, money, growth, or status starts making decisions for you. Why "harder is easier" when your principles are clear enough to remove debate from the moments that matter. How companies, creators, and brands slowly trade away their soul through small compromises that seem harmless in the moment. Why alignment matters more than scale when choosing clients, customers, sponsors, platforms, partners, and investors. How to build something durable without losing the trust, purpose, and values that made it worth building in the first place. The Core Idea: Growth Without Betrayal The real test of success is whether you can grow without betraying what made you worth trusting. It is easy to talk about values when nothing is on the line. It is easy to say you care about quality, access, creativity, service, truth, community, or long-term thinking when the stakes are low. But values only become real when they cost you something. That might happen when there is a big check on the table from a misaligned sponsor. It might happen when an investor wants a different path than the one you set out to build. It might happen when the algorithm rewards a version of you that is more inflammatory, less nuanced, and less honest. It might happen when you can quietly take the shortcut, ship something you don't believe in, or make a decision that no one will notice in the short term. Those are the moments that reveal the truth. Not the words on the wall, not the mission statement, not the brand deck, and not the beautifully written values page. The decision is the proof. Eric's argument is that if you want to build something incorruptible, you have to know what you stand for before those moments arrive. Once the pressure is here, it becomes much harder to think clearly. Success Attracts Predators One of the most powerful parts of this conversation is Eric's warning about success. Most of us are trained to think of success as pure upside: more customers, more revenue, more attention, more leverage, more opportunity, and more proof that the thing is working. Eric flips that idea on its head. Success is not only a source of strength. It is also a liability, because the more valuable your work becomes, the more attractive it becomes to people and systems that want to use it for their own ends. That can look like: Investors who want growth at any cost. Platforms that reward you for becoming a more extreme version of yourself. Partners who want access to your audience but do not share your values. A company acquiring a beloved brand and slowly stripping away what people trusted about it. Your own internal pressure to keep the numbers moving up and to the right, even when the work starts to feel misaligned. This is where corruption often begins. Not with one giant evil decision, but with tiny tradeoffs. A small compromise here, a slightly misaligned deal there, a decision that seems harmless because "no one will notice," or a shortcut taken because the quarter is tight. Over time, the thing that made you trusted starts to erode. The work still looks successful from the outside, but inside the machine, something essential has been traded away. The Gravity of Platforms Eric and I also talk about the pressure creators face from platforms. This part is especially relevant if you make anything for the internet. The promise of platforms is access. You can reach people, publish instantly, build a community, and grow a business without asking for permission from traditional gatekeepers. That is powerful, and I don't want to minimize how much opportunity that has created. But platforms also have values. Not values in the human sense, but values in the incentive sense. They reward certain behaviors and punish others. They reward what keeps people clicking, watching, reacting, arguing, and coming back. Over time, creators start to adapt. You post something thoughtful and nuanced, and almost nobody sees it. You post something sharper, more polarizing, more emotionally charged, and suddenly the platform lights up. That teaches you something, whether you want it to or not. The danger is that you start to confuse what the algorithm rewards with what people actually need. You begin making tiny adjustments: a stronger hook, a more controversial angle, less complexity, more certainty, more outrage, less truth. Eventually, you may not even notice that your voice has changed. That is the gravity Eric is talking about. It is not a force that announces itself. It is a force that quietly pulls until one day you realize you have been shaped by something you never consciously chose. Trust Is a Bank Account One of my favorite ideas from Eric's book is what he calls the culture bank. The idea is simple: trust is an asset. Every time you make a sacrifice for the sake of a principle, you make a deposit. Every time you betray a principle for short-term gain, you make a withdrawal. Eric's rule is almost painfully simple: Only make deposits. Never make withdrawals. Of course, we are human. We make mistakes. Sometimes we think we are doing the right thing and we get it wrong. Sometimes something breaks, a customer gets disappointed, or a decision does not land the way we intended. That is not the point. The point is not perfection. The point is to avoid intentional withdrawals. Don't knowingly trade trust for a quick hit. Don't knowingly betray the values that made people believe in you. Don't knowingly cash out your reputation for something that will not matter a year from now. Because trust takes a long time to build and almost no time to destroy. When you are a creator, founder, or entrepreneur, trust is not a soft idea. It is the business, the brand, the relationship, and the reason people come back. Harder Is Easier Another principle Eric shares is this: harder is easier. At first, that sounds backwards, but the more you sit with it, the more it makes sense. When your principles are unclear, every decision becomes a debate: Should we take this client? Should we work with this sponsor? Should we ship something that is not good enough? Should we raise prices in a way that violates what we promised? Should we optimize for short-term revenue even if it damages long-term trust? If you don't know what you stand for, every one of those moments requires a new meeting, a new justification, a new argument, and a new rationalization. When your principles are clear, many decisions become simpler. Not always easier in the short term, but simpler. You already know what the answer is. You may still have to do the hard work, find another way, absorb some pain, or get more creative, but you don't have to wonder who you are. For a creator, this might mean knowing the kind of clients you will not take. For a founder, it might mean knowing the kind of investors you will not accept. For a leader, it might mean knowing the kind of culture you will not tolerate. For a brand, it might mean knowing which promises are sacred. Values Are Not Decoration We also talk about the difference between values as corporate decoration and values as operating instructions. Most of us have seen the empty version: company values on a wall, mission statements nobody remembers, and nice words that disappear the second the business is under pressure. Real values are different because real values shape decisions. They influence who you hire, who you fire, who you serve, what you build, what you refuse, how you respond when something goes wrong, and what you do when nobody is watching. At CreativeLive, one of our core values was access. That value shaped the business model. It shaped the decision to make live classes available for free while we were creating them. It shaped the way people encountered the brand and the way the community experienced the work. Yes, there were plenty of moments where people looked at that and asked why we were giving so much away. But that was the point. Access wasn't a slogan. It was a decision, and the decision is what made the value real. Alignment Beats Anyone With a Dollar Toward the end of the conversation, we talk about one of the most important lessons for creators: not every customer is your customer. Early on, this can be hard to hear. When you're trying to make a living with your camera, your writing, your design work, your product, your ideas, or your creative practice, the temptation is to say yes to anyone with a dollar and a heartbeat. I get it. I've been there. Over time, though, the goal is not to work with everyone. The goal is to find the right people. The right clients. The right customers. The right sponsors. The right collaborators. The right platforms. The right partners. The right community. When I was making millions of dollars a year as a photographer, I didn't need millions of customers. I needed a small number of deeply aligned clients. That is true for a lot of creative businesses. Scale is seductive, but alignment is durable. When you know your values, it becomes easier to choose who you want to work with and just as importantly, who you don't. About Eric Ries Eric Ries is an entrepreneur, author, and long-term thinker whose ideas have shaped how companies are built and managed over the last two decades. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, as well as The Leader's Guide and The Startup Way. As a founder, Eric has put his ideas into practice through The Long-Term Stock Exchange, Answer.AI, the Lean Startup Co, Virgil, and IMVU, where the ideas that became the Lean Startup method were forged. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great, explores why organizations lose their way and how leaders can build companies that endure without losing their soul. Follow Eric Ries LinkedIn X Instagram TikTok Newsletter Incorruptible The Eric Ries Show YouTube Timecodes 04:20 – Why this is an unusually powerful time to be a creator 06:31 – Why Eric says all of his books come from pain 07:29 – How platforms shape creators through algorithmic gravity 10:58 – Eric describes the war for the soul of the economy 13:40 – Chase shares what happened after raising venture capital for CreativeLive 17:17 – Why corruption often looks more like corrosion than scandal 19:52 – Why success attracts predators 21:35 – What Steve Jobs understood about defending principles 23:09 – Why companies need integrity and the ability to keep a promise 25:44 – How real values shape hiring, decisions, and culture 31:35 – Eric explains the "culture bank" and why trust is an asset 33:55 – Why the rule is simple: only make deposits, never withdrawals 36:05 – Chase shares the CreativeLive value of access 38:19 – How to recover when you make a mistake 44:16 – Why creators should choose alignment over anyone with a dollar 46:15 – Why the right audience matters more than the biggest audience 48:41 – Eric's new book, Incorruptible Questions to Ask Yourself If you want to turn this episode into action, take a few minutes with these questions: What do I actually stand for in my work? Where am I letting outside incentives shape my decisions without realizing it? What kind of success would I not want if it required betraying my values? Where have I confused growth with alignment? Which clients, customers, platforms, sponsors, or partners are pulling me away from the work I want to be known for? What is one trust deposit I could make this week? What is one trust withdrawal I need to stop making? What promise do I want my work to make and keep? A Simple Practice for Staying Incorruptible Here's something practical you can do this week. Write down three lists and be brutally honest with yourself: What I stand for: the values that should guide your work, offers, partnerships, clients, platforms, and decisions. What I will not trade: the principles you are unwilling to sacrifice for money, growth, attention, status, convenience, or approval. What I need to change: the places where your current behavior is not aligned with what you say you believe. This is not a branding exercise, and it is not about coming up with impressive words. It is about making decisions easier before the pressure arrives. Because when the opportunity shows up, when the money is on the table, when the algorithm rewards the wrong thing, when the shortcut looks harmless, you want to already know who you are. Final Thought The longer I build things, the more I believe that trust is everything. Trust is what makes people come back. Trust is what makes a brand durable. Trust is what makes a creative career sustainable. Trust is what allows a company, a community, a body of work, or a reputation to compound over time. But trust is also fragile. It can be spent, traded, and quietly eroded by decisions that seem small in the moment. That is why this conversation with Eric matters. The goal is not just to build something successful. The goal is to build something worthy of the success it earns: something aligned, durable, and trustworthy enough that people can believe in it over the long term. Until next time: know what you stand for, protect the trust you've built, and build something that can grow without being captured.

What happens when the author of The Lean Startup starts questioning the very system that built Silicon Valley? In this episode of Remarkable People, Eric Ries joins Guy Kawasaki to unpack the ideas behind his new book, Incorruptible, and explain why so many great companies lose their soul as they grow. Eric explores corruption in modern business, the dangers of shareholder primacy, and why companies like Costco and Novo Nordisk have resisted the pressures that break other organizations. He also shares how founders can build structures that protect trust, mission, and long-term thinking from the start. If you've ever wondered whether companies can scale without selling out, this conversation will challenge the way you think about capitalism, leadership, and innovation.--Guy Kawasaki is on a mission to make you remarkable. His Remarkable People podcast features interviews with remarkable people such as Jane Goodall, Marc Benioff, Woz, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Bob Cialdini. Every episode will make you more remarkable.With his decades of experience in Silicon Valley as a Venture Capitalist and advisor to the top entrepreneurs in the world, Guy's questions come from a place of curiosity and passion for technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and marketing. If you love society and culture, documentaries, and business podcasts, take a second to follow Remarkable People.Listeners of the Remarkable People podcast will learn from some of the most successful people in the world with practical tips and inspiring stories that will help you be more remarkable.Episodes of Remarkable People organized by topic: https://bit.ly/rptopologyListen to Remarkable People here: **https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/guy-kawasakis-remarkable-people/id1483081827**

What if the way we think about business value, trust, and capitalism itself is fundamentally broken? Eric Ries' The Lean Startup changed how a generation of entrepreneurs build companies. Now, Ries takes aim at some of the most sacred business assumptions today in his new book, Incorruptible. Ries joins Rapid Response to share what he witnessed firsthand in the clash between Anthropic and the US government, and why he believes the current system is failing the very people it's supposed to serve. He also brings in-the-trenches stories from Cloudflare, Novo Nordisk, and Whole Foods to make the case that courage, not capital, may be the most undervalued asset in business right now.Visit the Rapid Response website here: https://www.rapidresponseshow.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Eric Ries: Incorruptible Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, The Leader's Guide, and The Startup Way. Over the last two decades, his ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great (Amazon, Bookshop)*. If you build a great organization, the predators will come. With the right principles in place, not only can you protect what you love, but help many people flourish because of it. In this conversation, Eric and I show you exactly where to start. Key Points Most leaders are one acquisition, one IPO, one board meeting away from seeing something they love turn into something they hate. If you build something great, they will come. The “they” are the predators who are willing to kill the golden goose. Financial gravity is the force no one controls but everyone obeys. Appreciating its realities and laws will help you build stronger. Rather than framing profit as good or bad, define profit as how you contribute to human flourishing. Harder is easier. Rather than viewing principles as a burden, the best leaders see principles as opportunities. Design the business model so the organization prospers only via mission attainment. Resources Mentioned Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries (Amazon, Bookshop)* Interview Notes Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required). Related Episodes Doing Better Than Zero-Sum Thinking, with Renée Mauborgne (episode 641) Crafting the Modern Business Plan, with Seth Godin (episode 704) Notice Disruption and Innovate Through It, with Steve Blank (episode 761) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Read my NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming -  www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, one of the most influential business books of the past 25 years, and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the first new U.S. exchange to both list and trade multiple stocks since NASDAQ launched 50 years ago. His new book is Incorruptible. Key Learnings The more successful a company becomes, the more valuable it is as a target. Companies are worth stealing and taking over. Most founders are naive about this and don't understand what's coming for them. They've been following the so-called best practices about how companies should be built, structured, and governed. Most of those best practices are value-destroying. Sol Price was a lawyer before he became an entrepreneur. He believed a lawyer had a fiduciary duty to put the client's interests before his own. So when he became a retailer, he asked: "Who's my client?" The customer. He treated the customer as the person he would rather die than betray. When competitors sold a product for less, he'd put up signs in his own store: "Don't buy this from me. You can get it cheaper somewhere else." He capped his margins at 14 percent. He paid above-market wages. It is so much easier to destroy than to create. One day, Sol came into work and couldn't get into his office because the locks had been changed. Investors had pushed him out and forced Fedmart to practice retail best practices. Within seven years, they bankrupted the company. We've built an economy that rewards people for cost-cutting without holding them accountable for the consequences to trustworthiness, brand, or culture. The origin story of Costco: Sol took two weeks off, then leased the office upstairs from Fedmart and started Price Club. One of the young guys who left with him, Jim Sinegal, had worked his way up from stock boy. Jim eventually started his own company using the Sol ethos. A few years later, their companies merged to form what we now call Costco. Wall Street routinely calls Costco the exception to every rule. Wall Street analysts say things like: "At Costco, they take money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invest it in the customer experience." As if that's a criticism. Costco endures because it's protected by a governance fortress. A series of worst practices that resist outside pressure structurally. The $1.50 hot dog has been the same price since 1986. A McDonald's Big Mac was $1.60 in 1986. Today that same Big Mac in California is over $7. Costco sells more hot dogs than every Major League Baseball stadium in America combined. If they raised the combo to $7, it would be a billion dollars of extra net income. They could do it. They choose not to. "If you raise the price of the effing hot dog, I will kill you. So figure it out." Jim Sinegal said it to his COO in 2008 when costs were rising. Figure it out. Costco vertically integrated the hot dog supply chain. They own hot dog production plants in multiple cities. They worked deals with soda vendors. They did all that extra work for the privilege of not making more money on the hot dog. Harder is easier. "When you take the hard road, when you make a principled commitment, you get these almost unbelievable values. Because you're generating the most underrated and most valuable asset in all of business: trustworthiness." "Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life." Jerzy Gregorek, Olympic weightlifter. "Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder. Nobody wanna lift these heavy ass weights." Ronnie Coleman, eight-time Mr. Olympia. Everyone wants the outcome. Nobody wants to do the actual thing. Culture and mission can be cultivated, not commanded. Most leaders get this wrong. They say "I'm in charge of my team." But can you command your team to have integrity? Can you command it to have a particular culture? You have to make consistent, responsible choices, just like cultivating health in your body. Get reps. Eric gave practice talks at a Hobee's restaurant at 7 AM to six people just to get the reps. Caring and trying to do a good job is so unbelievably rare. That alone is a competitive advantage. Feedback tells you something about the person giving it, not about yourself. If someone reads Eric's manuscript and says, "This book sucks," he hasn't learned anything about the book. He's learned this person doesn't like this kind of book. When he stopped arguing with negative customer reviews and started studying who they came from, he noticed patterns. People 16 and younger loved the product. People 16 and older hated it. He learned who his product was for. Separate qualitative from quantitative feedback. Qualitative is for hypothesis generation. Quantitative is for hypothesis validation. When test readers told him a chapter wasn't working, that was qualitative. When the platform data showed nobody was getting past that chapter, that was quantitative. You need both to know what to fix. It is always too early until it's too late. Eric tells the story of a multibillion-dollar founder he warned before his IPO. The founder talked to his bankers, lawyers, and CFO. They told him Eric was a downer. The founder went public anyway with conventional governance. Five months later, his stock dropped 90 percent, and he was ousted. The best time to plant a tree is 40 years ago. The second-best time is today. Eric's checklist for building an incorruptible company: Encode your mission into the corporate charter. Most founders have never read their charter. If your mission statement says one thing but your legal charter says another, you're lying. The easiest fix: file a public benefit corp filing (PBC). Two pages. 44 states. Your lawyer can do it tomorrow. Identify your fiduciary commitments. Who would you rather die than betray? Is it your customers? Your employees? Product quality? You decide. If your answer is nobody, you're a sociopath. The whole book is for the people who actually want to accomplish something. Align your employees to that mission. Make sure everybody on the team is committed to the same fiduciary priority. Create a director's oath. Like the Hippocratic Oath for doctors, but for your board. They must pledge to commit to the company's mission. Board betrayal and investor pressure are leading causes of death of companies in the modern world. Make the directors accountable to somebody. Power without accountability is corrosive to the human spirit. Novo Nordisk is governed by a nonprofit foundation. Patagonia is governed by a perpetual purpose trust. John Lewis Partnership in the UK is governed by an employee ownership trust. IKEA, Vanguard, and REI all have these structures. The data shows these companies are dramatically more stable and higher performing than conventional structures. You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. People love to blame the system. But you're not just a passenger. You're part of what creates the system. Where you work. What you buy. What you give your attention to. Every one of those choices is fueling somebody's company, somebody's algorithm, somebody's bonus. The richest people in the world spend billions on PR because they know your individual choices matter. Use that power. Eric's champagne moment a year from now: a grassroots movement around Incorruptible. This book won't get wall-to-wall media coverage. It's antagonistic to people in power. So Eric hopes readers will hand it to their founders, their bosses, their friends. If consumers and employees start demanding, "I want to work in an incorruptible company," that's the toast. Reflection Questions What is your equivalent of Costco's hot dog? The one commitment you'd defend even when it's financially painful, even when the easy move would be to abandon it? Have you ever read your corporate charter, or the foundational document of your team or department? Does what's actually written match what you say you stand for? Where in your work or life would the harder short-term path build something more durable in the long run? Are you willing to lift the heavy weights? More Learning #258: Jesse Itzler: Creating Your Life Resume & Living Outside the Box #529: James Clear: Setting Up Your Future Self & Becoming an Optimist #565: Noah Kahan: The Art of Asking For What You Want Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!  01:03 Meet Eric Ries  02:55 Is It Possible to Build an Incorruptible Company?  04:04 Why Culture Alone Won't Save You  05:13 Sol Price, Fedmart, and the Locks That Got Changed  07:56 Why Wall Street Calls Costco the Exception  09:11 The $1.50 Hot Dog Story  13:59 Harder Is Easier: The Principle Behind It All  16:48 Why Governance Is Just Soul Craft  19:50 Building the First New Stock Exchange Since Nasdaq  22:33 Eric's Communication Style: Reps, Not Talent  30:52 The Opportunity Hiding in Broken Markets  31:59 How to Know Which Feedback to Listen To  35:39 Qualitative vs. Quantitative: Why You Need Both  37:23 The Whole Foods Cautionary Tale  40:25 The Founder's Checklist for Building Something Durable  43:44 Encode Your Mission Into the Corporate Charter  47:35 You Are Not Stuck in Traffic. You Are the Traffic.  52:37 The Champagne Question: A Grassroots Movement  55:27 James Clear, Author's Equity, and the Future of Publishing 56:43 EOPC

Eric Ries wrote the book that changed how the entire world builds startups. Now he's back with a more urgent argument: the way we're taught to build companies is quietly turning them against everything that made them worth building in the first place. The creator of The Lean Startup has spent years watching mission-driven founders get fired from their own companies, watching the spark that started everything get extinguished by the very success they worked so hard to create—and he's finally written the blueprint to stop it. In this interview, Eric breaks down the core ideas behind his new book Incorruptible, why your corporate charter was designed to sound boring so you'd ignore it, and how the loyalty of your best customers is the most valuable—and most endangered—asset your business has. What you'll learn in this interview: • Why the metrics you're tracking are actively destroying customer loyalty—and what to measure instead • The IMVU pivot story: how six months of data finally broke through Eric's stubbornness and forced the pivot that saved the company • Why product improvements that don't change customer behavior aren't improvements at all • How to know when it's time to pivot—and why the real problem is never the decision itself but getting your team to agree on the facts • Why DTC brands are systematically burning their most loyal customers with re-acquisition marketing they've already earned • The Saul Price story: how the founder of Fed-Mart was locked out of his own company—and came back to build Costco • Why only 20% of founders are still CEO three years after IPO—and the governance decisions made at founding that cause it • Why your corporate structure was deliberately designed to sound boring so you'll ignore it until it's too late • The two paths every mission-driven founder must master: the path of ethos and the path of integrity • How Novo Nordisk's 100-year-old governance structure—built by a Nobel laureate in the 1920s—accidentally created the most profitable pharmaceutical in history If you're an early-stage founder, a DTC operator who cares about building something that lasts, or anyone who's ever wondered why the companies that start with the most idealism seem to end up the most corrupt, this conversation will fundamentally change how you think about structure, loyalty, and what it actually means to build a company worth protecting. SAVE 50% ON OMNISEND FOR 3 MONTHS Get 50% off your first 3 months of email and SMS marketing with Omnisend with the code FOUNDR50. Just head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://your.omnisend.com/foundr⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. WANT TO GROW YOUR BRAND WITH META ADS? Join the Foundr Operators Waitlist → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://foundr.com/operators⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ HOW WE CAN HELP YOU SCALE YOUR BUSINESS FASTER Learn directly from 7, 8 & 9-figure founders inside Foundr+ Start your $1 trial → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.foundr.com/startdollartrial⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ PREFER A CUSTOM ROADMAP AND 1-ON-1 COACHING? → Starting from scratch? Apply here → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://foundr.com/pages/coaching-start-application⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ → Already have a store? Apply here → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://foundr.com/pages/coaching-growth-application⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ CONNECT WITH NATHAN CHAN Instagram → ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/nathanchan⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn → ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhchan/⁠⁠⁠ CONNECT WITH ERIC RIES Instagram → ⁠https://www.instagram.com/ericriesactual/ LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/ Website → https://theleanstartup.com/ FOLLOW FOUNDR FOR MORE BUSINESS GROWTH STRATEGIES YouTube → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/2uyvzdt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Website → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.foundr.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/foundr/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Facebook → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/foundr⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/foundr⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/foundr/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Podcast → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.foundr.com/podcast⁠