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I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
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Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parent comment didn’t say anything about size or wall street. It said leadership is what has preserved it. Which it doesn’t seem you have refuted in any meaningful way. You just restated what the parent comment is responding to with no further reasoning as to why leadership doesn’t account for it.
I honestly don't understand your comment, so let me try and recapitulate what I think you're saying and what I think I was saying, and then you can tell me where I missed the mark. What I hear you saying is that the original comment simply said that leadership by itself is enough to preserve the Costco ethos. It didn't say anything about size or Wall Street or anything else. Is that right? The reason I responded the…
Interesting in that I wonder whether government organizations and in particular the highly qualified government members and their functions can be protected in a similar manner from political leaders elected in a democracy.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#503Do you have any policy recommendations for governments that could help public companies preserve their culture?
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#504I'll give you a read. If you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend the Knapp Commission Report. Its about police corruption in New York City in 1972, but its lessons on systemic and institutionalized corruption are highly transferable to other contexts. Probably the most common naive mistake I see is people thinking their subfield is special and they are the first to really notice / understand fraud within it…
gotta love HN. Top comment on an AMA with an author who's actually written books is "Here is a book you should read".
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#505>>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."
Mate, tried as hard as you like, it's called "fundamental laws of capitalism". I understand that won't sell books, and denial does, but c'mon.
>> 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 I wanted to know what all of us can do to stop that from happening.
Because it's a systemic set of capitalistic incentives, where either you find a way to be ok to forego growth for a different set of non-capitalistic values, which can only work if you're self-bootstrapped and have no investor pressure, or you go the way that making more profit pushes you towards. You can try as hard to reframe the picture, but those are the objective incentives of the capitalistic market, and what you're selling is illusions for entrepreneurs that want to delude themselves away from personal responsibility in order to sleep at night.
>> My new book _Incorruptible_ is my attempt to explain the invisible forces that shape organizations, and how a handful of companies (like Costco, Patagonia, and Novo Nordisk) have successfully been structured to resist gravity and thrive for decades -- or even centuries.
LOL, Costco? Really? The only good example here is Patagonia, and it's because they hacked the stakeholder system with a two-entities solution.
Good luck with your book, I'm sure that you'll find enough capitalists that want to hear just another fable to make it successful.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#506Is the most important decision to avoid corruption choosing a good business to go into in the first place? Because I feel like some businesses, like free social media which make their money off of ads, are more corruptible than others.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#507> how a handful of companies (like Costco[..]) have successfully been structured to resist gravity "I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty," Jelineck recalled[..]. "We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you." That's not structure, that's leadership. They were about to change the price, but one guy at the top with au…
So many businesspeople can’t tell the difference between a value-add and a profit centre.
It isn’t about being idealistic, it’s just about understanding what makes people tick, and how to best get them to part with their money - and understanding that a business is not one dimensional.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#508«Please shut up and take my money».
Jokes aside - can’t wait. Your book The Lean Startup helped me so much. I read it tens of times. It’s one of the reason I got great traction with mine startup https://playcode.io - AI App Builder on our custom cloud.
Thank you Eric.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#509HR has been receiving a lot of positive and negative attention over the last 8 years, culminating lately with some CEOs notably eliminating the HR org entirely. Do you see HR as a positive , negative or mixed force for driving “Incorruptibility “ ?
When it comes to this I think that the main problem is with hiring practices of people opa. If you do not have people with education either in legal/economy psychology you are not getting good People Ops team. You need to have a maximum value team.
Also, an HR that has a right education can and will pushback against decisions that do not make sense such as removing employee that has essential know-how knowledge and that brings a value to the team.
The problem is that a lot of people in management do not want to hear feedback and only want to be surrounded by positive thinking and people that they can micromanage (even while the ship is sinking). Hiring people that do not have right education is basically a way to avoid any feedback and criticism, while having people that will do work that they are not really educated for, but happy because of the salary.
Another problem is gender disproportion in this field.
You can't expect a literature major in HRBP role to understand micro and macro organization of the business and how it is affected by various stuff.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#510I think that for example Zuckerberg has built a structure where he is basically irreplaceable. It had to do with A/B shares where, while having a lot less shares, he made sure to have the controlling ones.
While this is good while the founder is alive, it sort of begs the question how long will the company that has structure like that run after the founder is gone. I believe it could go to some family foundation that controls the company, but I guess that is still prone to corruption.
I think that there are a lot of interesting examples in gaming industry - founders start something and they are pushed from the company due to acquisition or by the shareholders. Let us not forget hostile takeovers too.
As for startups - I think that it depends a lot from where you come from. For example, being in Europe, Serbia, it is a lot harder to bootstrap startup or to find investors. The best bet is organizing startup as a C corp in Delaware via something like Stripe Atlas in order to get (hopefully) some foreign investors interested. Investors here want to extract value before there is one there, which is a short term thinking. This in turn lead to risk aversion, opening the country for outsourcing model which is now collapsing and where there is small percentage of product based companies.