I haven't read the new book yet, but I'd be interested in your take on Disney's trajectory over the last, say, 2 decades. It seems to have strayed pretty far from Walt's original vision, largely due to the actions of Bob Iger. He took what used to be a company that was fueled by creativity and turned it into a machine that strip mines IP and extracts value. Iger purchased IP (Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Fox) as a risk mitigation strategy since you get an established brand you can exploit on day 1. But in doing so he killed the soul of Disney, which was built on big creative bets (literally sell the car to make a movie, mortgage the house to build a park).
I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
101–110 of 618 posts
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#102Are the lessons you have distilled applicable to other institutions in society which decline due to corruption? How is corruption different from your concept of financial gravity?
Yes. In the book, I do my best to explain how our current for-profit and non-profit labels don't really make sense, and that therefore these issues are pervasive in society (public/private sector has similar issues, as I discuss in the later chapters). Corruption = the symptom Gravity = the force that causes it In the book, I give the example of a bridge that collapses. If you ask an engineer "why did it collapse" yo…
Only an engineer under severe pressure would snark about gravity to leadership about a bridge collapse, though. A good engineer would challenge the missing context instead. If you ask an engineer “why did it collapse” without the correct statement of context, then of course you’ll get an answer you dislike, because they’re going to (as is human norm) assume their own context rather than the none you provided. Instead, ask better questions. “Are we liable for this collapse?” is usually what I would expect a corporate leader to want answered, and so as a senior engineer I would reply to the context-free question “why did it collapse?” with a context clarification request: “Are you asking about the immediate cause, about the root cause, or about which company should be held accountable?”. There’s nothing quite like watching an exec choke out an admission of interest in legal liability rather than engineering factors after interrupting an engineer working on the collapse who knows full well not to write checks that will get them cashiered :)
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#103What does "Best Seller" mean in this context? Who says it's a best seller?
"Instant New York Times Bestseller" [0]
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Incorruptible-Good-Companies-Great-St...
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#104[edit] Removed as my link was to a different Eric Ries.
Wrong Eric Ries? The writer of that blog claims to be a 65 yo Baby Boomer (would be 67 today), the one here is much younger than that iirc.
yes, this is the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ries
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#105You frame corruption as financial gravity, fixable by governance design at the firm level. But the dollar's strength has been reinforced for fifty years by oil trading in dollars. Tying our money to a conflict asset implicated in war, pollution, and enormous suffering. Can any company be incorruptible inside a monetary system that isn't?
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#106It will be interesting to see how many of those companies remain "incorruptible". Your new book seems a bit like a sequel to Jim Collins's 2001 book Good to Great . Several of the "great" companies including Circuit City, Fannie Mae, and Wells Fargo later ran into serious problems. And from an investor perspective, as a group they have underperformed the S&P 500. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/good-to-great-j…
yeah, this is very much the challenge with writing any kind of business book: the book is frozen in time yet the companies grow and change. I tried really really hard not to put any company up on a pedestal, or even make any forward-looking predictions, but merely to show how each company illustrates a specific concept from the book.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#107Eric, The Lean Startup had a huge influence on how I think about startups and product work, so first: thank you.
Given the current wave of AI-assisted coding (Claude Code/Codex) and the broader enshittification of SaaS/platforms, do you think B2B SaaS founders now face a new "we can just build this ourselves" problem?
How would you think about testing for that risk early?
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#108I haven't read the new book yet, but I'd be interested in your take on Disney's trajectory over the last, say, 2 decades. It seems to have strayed pretty far from Walt's original vision, largely due to the actions of Bob Iger. He took what used to be a company that was fueled by creativity and turned it into a machine that strip mines IP and extracts value. Iger purchased IP (Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Fox) as a risk…
I recently had the chance to meet Abigail Disney, who has been a very vocal critic of what's happened to her grandfather's ethos. It sounds quite sad.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#109[deleted]
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#110It will be interesting to see how many of those companies remain "incorruptible". Your new book seems a bit like a sequel to Jim Collins's 2001 book Good to Great . Several of the "great" companies including Circuit City, Fannie Mae, and Wells Fargo later ran into serious problems. And from an investor perspective, as a group they have underperformed the S&P 500. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/good-to-great-j…
> And from an investor perspective, as a group they have underperformed the S&P 500.
This should be kind of obvious -- if they are avoiding doing awful things in the name of money, then they are leaving something on the table. You can't have your cake and eat it too. This is why the real solution is some kind of governance/regulation, because otherwise the market incentivizes being awful.