Steve Blank

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great, by Eric Ries.

Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn’t just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like taking the red pill in the Matrix. 

Some will read this book, think it’s interesting and then get back to figuring out to how get their next big round of funding or how to deal with AI disruption in their large company.

But what they’ll miss is that this is the book that will rebuild the corporate and startup world after the next financial crash.

That’s exactly what happened when Eric’s work, Alexander Osterwald’s work and mine created the Lean Startup. Lean was a neat theory until the dot com bubble crashed and investors (those who still had jobs,) were hiding under their desks. Only then were startups and VCs amenable to a radically new idea about how to build new ventures.

The same will happen here.

Part 1 is a great tutorial on how corporations morphed from serving the people to serving only its shareholders. Worth reading deeply.

Part 2 is the nuts and bolts about what to do about it. How to build companies with governance structures that endure.

Part 3 is about the network effect of building this class of companies. It also has a chapter that buries the lead. Eric had the core ideas for the concepts in the book in 2019 when he started the Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE). Never heard of it? Welcome to the club. Its core diagnosis was absolutely right: public markets reward short-termism. LTSE tried to solve a governance problem with an exchange listing. In hindsight it took all the accumulated wisdom in this book to understand what it will take to make meaningful change.

Its time may come and this book may be the catalyst.

This book will possibly be more important than the Lean Startup ever was – for you, your company and society as a whole. Read it.

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