491–500 of 618 posts
What's the first, most practical step a founder can take if they want to start "gravity-proofing" their company today, something they could do by next week?
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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…
I've always admired Nintendo (NCL) for adequately managing their various successions, even in the case of sudden death (Satoru Iwata). I wish there were deep dives into their practices but they're very secretive.
How is Jeremy Howard doing? I remember studying machine learning with his videos, he’s been so inspiring!
1. Why is the scrolling hijacked (in a super frustrating way) on incorruptible.co? 2. Why do the photos look like they've been mucked with by generative AI? Okay, I know these questions don't seem like good faith engagement — but it actually is hard for me to separate decisions like these from my assessment of whether a book like this is worth my time! (And you did say to ask you anything...)
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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…
> the claim that something by itself is enough has to explain why most companies are able to be destroyed, even though they have really good leadership I think most of us are happy to believe that most companies simply have bad leadership, that leadership quality really is the axis on which Costco differs from others. If you want us to believe that other (destroyed) companies' leadership is just as good as Costco's,…
In the book, I give dozens of examples of companies that were well-lead and then suddenly destroyed, often by outside actors who found a way to profit from their destruction. This often happened at the governance layer, while leadership watched helplessly from the sidelines.
So why hasn't this happened to Costco? I don't think it's a coincidence that Costco has a variety of "bad governance" provisions, such as a super-majority (of all shares, not just votes) provision threshold for shareholder votes, as just one example. When activists, analysts and other Wall Street actors have tried over the years to force Costco to change, its leadership has been insulated from this pressure. I think that is a structural factor that is important.
Again, structure does not _cause_ ethos. It protects it. My argument in the book is you need both.
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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…
This reply genuinely reads like AI and I don't mean to insult you. Perhaps large language models have been trained too much on your books. Your first 2 to 3ish paragraph (explanation and rephrasing) is very characteristic of an AI when they're pressed (e.g. on why they recently hallucinated).
> co-founded an AI R&D lab called Answer.AI with Jeremy Howard How is Jeremy Howard doing? I remember studying machine learning with his videos, he’s been so inspiring!
stay tuned
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Like a lot of things, bad actors only have to get you to fail the test of succession once while the company has to succeed at it every time. Time is not on any companies side here and the longer it goes the more failing that test of succession starts to look like a law of nature.
Ultimately, nothing lasts forever and entropy takes all. Thinking about this problem and extending the average company life seem like worthwhile endeavors while we're trapped on this ball of mud.
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That's true, and yet the evidence shows that some companies have been able to do it. I think there's something to be learned by studying those companies as a data set.
They have been able to "so far". This isn't to say that we shouldn't learn from them how to push the failure date as far into the future as you can. I just don't think you can truly make something incorruptible.
I appreciate you engaging with the argument in good faith and I look forward to hearing what you think of the book if you do decide to read it.