Eric Ries published Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad—and How Great Companies Stay Great in 2026. This book is about:
- Why successful organizations can drift away from their original values?
- How short-term incentives shape corporate behavior?
- How can we build companies that remain resilient, mission-driven, and focused on long-term value?
Specific points from the book:
- Financial gravity: pressure from investors, markets, customers, or other powerful actors gradually change how a company behaves
- “Golden goose”: successful companies can destroy the principles that originally made them successful. FedMart, Sears, Polaroid, Cadbury, Toys “R” Us.
- Purpose, Coherence, Integrity are the three core elements of the book's blueprint: (a) build something worth protecting, (b) align the business around the mission, (c) create structures capable of protecting it.
- Human flourishing: a company’s mission should ultimately contribute to human well-being rather than simply maximize financial extraction.
- Mission drive: design the company in such a way that accomplishing its mission is how it makes money. Devoted Health is keeping members healthier improves both patient outcomes and the company’s economics.
- Mission guardians: people or institutions are given explicit authority to defend the mission when financial or strategic pressure appears.
- Constitutional governance: protecting values through corporate structure rather than relying on a good founder or CEO remaining in charge forever.
- Public Benefit Corporations: legal structure that allows a company to encode a specific public-benefit mission into its charter (counter to fiduciary duty).
- Mission-locked constellations: networks of companies, foundations, trusts, cooperatives, and other institutions can reinforce one another. MondragĂłn.
- Spiritual holding companies: separate economic ownership from control over the mission. Patagonia, Bosch, Novo Nordisk, Hershey, IKEA.
- Patagonia Purpose Trust protects the company’s mission while the Holdfast Collective receives profits to support environmental work.
- Mission transmission: pushing values outward through suppliers, customers, partners, and communities.
- Tony’s Chocolonely: its commitment to reducing exploitation in cocoa supply chains became a constraint on how it operated which turned out to be its competitive advantage.
- Standards as a form of power: Volvo giving away the patent for the three-point seat belt