Episode #1053 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with Eric Ries gets into a question that sits underneath almost every great company story: why do organizations that begin with strong values, bold missions and real customer love so often lose their way? Eric is one of the most influential entrepreneurs and management thinkers of the past two decades. Best known as the creator of The Lean Startup movement, his work changed how founders, innovators and established organizations build products, test ideas and bring innovation to market. Startups, Fortune 500 companies, governments and nonprofits have all been shaped by his thinking. But in this conversation, Eric is looking at something deeper than how companies begin. He is asking what happens after they succeed.

His latest book, Incorruptible – Why Good Companies Go Bad… And How Great Companies Stay Great, challenges the easy explanation that corporate corruption is mostly about bad people making bad choices.

Eric makes the case that the more dangerous forces are often structural. Incentives… governance… ownership models… capital markets. The invisible pull of what he calls “financial gravity”. Over time, these forces can slowly move a company away from the very principles that made it worth building in the first place. That idea feels especially important in a business culture still obsessed with speed, scale and disruption. We celebrate growth, but rarely ask what growth does to the organization itself. We admire mission-driven companies, but often ignore the systems required to protect the mission once pressure increases. We talk about leadership, but not enough about stewardship. In this conversation, Eric and I talk about the journey of The Lean Startup, the dark side of success, the paradox of enlightened capitalism, shareholder primacy, corporate governance and why structure may be one of the most overlooked forces in whether a company stays true to itself. We also get into AI, previous waves of technological disruption, generational perspectives on business values and why mission-driven organizations may be entering a new renaissance. Mostly, this is a conversation about building companies that can endure without becoming something they were never meant to be. The future may not belong simply to the fastest companies or the most efficient ones. It may belong to the organizations intentionally designed to remain worthy of trust as they grow.

Listen to my conversation with Eric Ries here: Great Companies With Eric Ries – TWMJ #1053.

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