What if the best practices taught in every business school are quietly destroying the organisations that follow them? Eric Ries — author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange — joins Aidan McCullen to expose the hidden forces that corrupt mission-driven organisations, and to reveal the structural defences that keep outliers like Costco immune.
About Eric Ries Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and the bestselling author of The Lean Startup. His new book, Incorruptible, maps the structural forces that destroy company missions and lays out a blueprint for building organisations that resist them. He is also the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE).
About Aidan McCullen Aidan McCullen is a Thinkers50-recognised host, keynote speaker, author of Undisruptable, and former professional athlete. He is the founder and host of The Innovation Show — the podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.
In this conversation, Eric reveals:
- Why mission drift and bureaucracy are really corruption — and why naming them that changes everything
- How financial gravity silently pulls every organisation toward value extraction unless actively resisted
- The professor story that launched the book — and the question that haunts every founder: is it even possible to build an incorruptible organisation?
- The LTSE ambush: how Eric's team chose potential bankruptcy over compromising their principles — and why that decision ultimately saved the company
- Why the founder hero story and the market story are the same story told backwards — and how that confusion destroys organisations from the inside
- The golden goose paradox: why Sol Price and Robert Owen kept losing control of the very organisations they built
- The Costco governance fortress — how Jim Sinegal created a structure that protects the fiduciary-to-the-customer ethos no matter how hard Wall Street pushes back
00:00 Sponsor Message
00:26 Naming Corruption
02:32 Why Best Practices Fail
05:08 Professor Story Wake Up Call
09:57 Financial Gravity And Strength
12:26 LTSE Ambush And Principles
19:14 Founder Hero Vs Market Story
23:56 Golden Goose And Case Studies
25:19 Sol Price And Robert Owen
30:46 Costco Governance Fortress
33:15 Wrap Up And Resources
34:26 Sponsor Outro
Guest links:
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Incorruptible, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
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