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Great Companies With Eric Ries – This Week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel Conversation

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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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.