Outthinkers
The Outthinkers podcast is a growth strategy podcast hosted by Kaihan Krippendorff. Each week, Kaihan talks with forward-looking strategists and innovators that are challenging the status quo, leading the future of business, and shaping our world.
Chief strategy officers and executives can learn more and join the Outthinker community at https://outthinkernetwork.com/.
Outthinkers
#168 — Why Good Companies Go Bad: Eric Ries
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New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Eric Ries — author of the landmark The Lean Startup — about his new book Incorruptible, and why the way we've run companies for the last fifty years may be fundamentally corrupt. Not in the dramatic, headline-grabbing sense, but in the older, quieter sense of the word: a slow corrosion of the bonds that make an organisation strong, trusted, and worth building in the first place.
In this conversation they unpack how shareholder primacy — the idea that a company exists only to enrich its investors — took hold without a single vote ever being cast, and what it actually takes to build something that endures. Eric reflects on why this idea is far more recent and far more fragile than we assume, what the most enduring companies in the world have quietly been doing differently, and the practical mechanisms any founder or leader can use to protect a mission from the forces that will inevitably try to erode it.
The conversation covers:
- Why shareholder primacy is a recent invention — and why the "citizens vs tourists" problem in corporate governance changes how you should think about who really owns a company
- What "human flourishing" really means, why mission-driven companies aren't sacrificing financial performance, and how the best operators treat trustworthiness as an asset to bank rather than spend
- The practical defences — mission guardians, multi-entity "constellations," and the paths of ethos and integrity — that leaders can use today to build a governance fortress, no revolution required
Additional Resources:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/
Book: Incorruptible — https://www.incorruptible.co/
LHH: lhh.com
Thank you again to our sponsor, LHH.
Thank you to our executive producer Zach Ness, our producer Nazanin Homayoun Jam and our editor James Pearce. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.
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