Incorruptible by Eric Ries

A New York Times bestseller from Eric Ries, author of the international bestseller The Lean Startup. Why do good companies go bad, and how do great companies stay great?

The Lean Startup transformed how a generation of entrepreneurs built products, sparking a global movement for smarter, faster innovation. Now Eric Ries takes the next step, asking a deeper question. How do you build a company that stays true to its mission once it succeeds?

In Incorruptible, Ries reveals the hidden forces that pull even great organisations away from their values, and shows how to design businesses that can withstand that pressure. Drawing on two decades of work with founders, CEOs, and investors around the world, he offers a blueprint for mission-locked organisations that can grow, prosper, and endure without losing their soul.

Ries uses examples ranging from Cadbury and John Lewis Partnership to Vanguard and Anthropic, and tells the story of Whole Foods as one of the saddest in the book. A company profitable every quarter, loved by customers, built on what founder John Mackey called conscious capitalism, dismantled in six months when activist investors forced a sale and pocketed $500 million. Not because Mackey did anything wrong. Because the structure didn't match the ethos.

Incorruptible calls for a shift from shareholder primacy to mission primacy. It argues that the era of shareholder-first governance is already collapsing under its own weight, and that companies who want to endure need to build structural protection for their purpose before success attracts predators.

For founders, executives, investors, and anyone who cares about protecting the productive power of capitalism from short-term thinking.

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method, founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and cofounder of the AI research lab Answer.AI. The Lean Startup has sold over one million copies and been translated into more than thirty languages.

"The best and most important business book of the year." Dan Heath, author of Reset

"Magnificent." Rory Sutherland