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mehulashahHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Eric - I've worked for NASA, ATT, IBM, HP, Amazon, and Google, not to mention a couple of startups …

Eric - I've worked for NASA, ATT, IBM, HP, Amazon, and Google, not to mention a couple of startups that I started in between. None of them (except the startups, but they were brief) stayed true to their original mission. I haven't read your new book, but IMO, it's because the founders leave and the next leadership don't share the vision or values of the founders in the same way. After all, a company is a collaboration among people who want to make a contribution. When the people change, the company changes. It's inevitable. That said, you seem to have archetypes above Costco, Patagonia, and Novo Nordisk that avoided it. Can you comment on not what it takes to build such a company, but rather how to transform companies like those that I worked for into ones that resist gravity? Or is it too late?

Original discussionAMA: I'm Eric Ries (The Lean Startup) & Author of New Bestseller Incorruptible579 source comments · at import
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ER
eriesHN

Hey gang, you may remember me from such books as _The Lean Startup_ and _The Startup Way_. It's been fifteen years since I wrote The Lean Startup, and in that time I've seen some things. In both big companies and tiny startups, NGOs and governments, in almost every industry you can name. I've helped a lot of people create a lot of amazing companies, but I've also seen so many ways this can go wrong. There's a darkness in our industry that we often don't talk about. I kept watching good companies drift away from the missions they were founded on. Not because anyone woke up one day and decided to be evil, but because the structure they were built on slowly pulled them there. I call that pull "financial gravity." We've all experienced watching a company we love or admire be warped and broken beyond recognition; until it's a husk of its former self, or worse. I wanted to understand why. And …

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ER
eriesHN

One of the sad truths that the book tries to confront about the world we live in today: that most companies simply fail the test of succession. This does not have to be the reality that we live in. It is absolutely 100% possible to build organizations to resist gravity and even to transform organizations that have fallen into its clutches. The fact that this is rare tells you something about the incentive design and values of our current financial system. This is not a law of nature. I don't really think there's a short way for me to answer this question without having to summarize the entire book. This is what it's about. I'll simply say that the second part of the book, what I call "The Blueprint," is about both the governance and leadership tools that we have available to us to turn these organizations into the long-term, mission-driven, incorruptible places we all want to work at.

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utopiahHN

For NASA I don't know but all others that are private companies the "mission" is never "the mission". The mission is "making more money" and everything else, including the change in culture, is the result of how single focused "good" (according to the market) companies are. I was pondering about a piece of wisdom people often say, roughly going like "Oh yes, invest in stocks, the market always goes up!" and even though technically true they forget to mention that it's the case because losers get kicked out. A company that doesn't performed is removed from the indices so sure, market goes up BECAUSE losers leave. This isn't a moral stance by the way, just highlighting mechanisms to participate, and survive, in those environments.

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