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I think the evidence shows that the answer is yes.

I try to work through a few of these in the book. For example, the "social contagion" theory of layoffs from Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. Also, in my previous book and this one, I draw on a concept I call "career equity," which has to do with the fact that people's perception of what will get them ahead in an organizational hierarchy is, in very many ways, more real to them and more valuable to them than any kind of bonus incentive or financial equity you offer them.

More importantly, my goal in the book is to teach the reader how to see these deeper underlying forces that operate below the surface of most organizations. Once you see and identify them, you can learn how to wield them.

All of them? Really?

What's funny is when the book was published, I remember someone telling me that I should have included more examples of failed startups in the manuscript. I remember answering them, "Oh, I have. We just don't know which ones yet."

This is the difficulty of writing any kind of business book. There's just no way to use any company as an example to illustrate some principle without people misunderstanding that you're holding them up as the perfect or even great company. I use case studies to illustrate the concepts that I think are useful. I can't guarantee success any more than an athlete can tell you that if you study the way that Tony Gwynn hits the baseball, you too will be able to hit 300 in the big leagues.

It is true that most companies fail the test of succession. Even in the comment that you've made here, we've left unanswered the question of who will decide who should be chosen as the successor? That is something that can be influenced, but only at the institutional or structural level of an organization. Obviously, more details in the book.

I honestly don't understand your comment, so let me try and recapitulate what I think you're saying and what I think I was saying, and then you can tell me where I missed the mark.

What I hear you saying is that the original comment simply said that leadership by itself is enough to preserve the Costco ethos. It didn't say anything about size or Wall Street or anything else. Is that right?

The reason I responded the way that I did is that the claim that something by itself is enough has to explain why most companies are able to be destroyed, even though they have really good leadership. I think the common answer when people ask about Costco is that the reason why, for them, leadership was enough when it hasn't been for other people, is something like they're so large. Does that make sense?

Either way, in order to say that leadership by itself is sufficient, we have to figure out why Costco has been able to endure as a gigantic public company when, for most companies, the larger they become, the more valuable they become as a target. Meaning that Wall Street or other financial forces will intervene to change their values.

And the answer, which I lay out in the book (not in my original comment), is that Costco is protected by a very distinctive thing I call a "governance fortress." This fortress (and not merely their leadership) is the reason why they have been able to endure for forty years.

In fact, the predecessor company of Costco, spiritually speaking, was a company called FedMart that had the leadership and ethos but did not have the fortress. I'll leave it to you to read to find out what happened to them.

I'll just mention two which are also profiled in the book: 1. Devoted Health 2. The AI Underwriting Company (AIUC)

Oh, and thank you for the kind words. It's much appreciated.

I tend to use the metaphor of trying to carve the Grand Canyon with nothing more than water and gravity, but I appreciate you honoring and acknowledging the difficulty of this.

Honestly, I don't have formal criteria. I have young kids now, and I try to ask myself every once in a while, when they're old enough to really understand what I do for a living. When they ask me: "at that moment in history, what were you doing?" I want to be able to answer them and give them an answer that I and they will find satisfying.

I'll also be honest that I've my fill of conventional "success" in my life. I don't feel obligated to use the likelihood of success as a criterion anymore. I tend to just do the things that, in the moment, seem right to me. Or where it seems like, for whatever reason, no one else is willing or likely to try it, and I have been given that lonely assignment.

Many of the things that I've tried haven't worked out, but that's okay. I accept that that is a precondition of the kind of work I like to do.

One of the sad truths that the book tries to confront about the world we live in today: that most companies simply fail the test of succession. This does not have to be the reality that we live in. It is absolutely 100% possible to build organizations to resist gravity and even to transform organizations that have fallen into its clutches. The fact that this is rare tells you something about the incentive design and values of our current financial system. This is not a law of nature.

I don't really think there's a short way for me to answer this question without having to summarize the entire book. This is what it's about. I'll simply say that the second part of the book, what I call "The Blueprint," is about both the governance and leadership tools that we have available to us to turn these organizations into the long-term, mission-driven, incorruptible places we all want to work at.

If those are your questions, I'm confident you're going to like the book a lot as it gets into precisely those topics.

I will say, in general, I think AI is an amplifier of values, and so it will make the good companies better and the bad companies worse. Or maybe more accurately, it will make the good parts of companies better and the bad parts of companies worse.

Either way, I do think that LLMs can solve many of the leadership challenges that we have to solve today with hierarchy and dashboards and bureaucracy, because LLMs are extremely good at summarizing the context of a given situation. One of the hardest leadership challenges of all is simply answering the simple question: What is my company doing right now?

That is a summarization challenge.

Thank you. I really appreciate your kind words, and I consider myself deeply fortunate that I've been able to speak my mind freely on these topics, at least so far.

You might want to ask yourself why, in all these years, you haven't heard of it. There's quite a few people invested in keeping it that way.

I got so frustrated that this is so difficult for people at the early stages to do with most law firms that I actually helped start a new law firm (called Virgil) to do it properly.

Virgil is an AI-powered law firm, but it doesn't let the AI do the legal work for you. It actually hires and trains human lawyers to become AI-powered superhumans. It handles lots of the really unpleasant back-office crap that early-stage companies absolutely hate dealing with, from payroll to compliance and a lot of finance stuff.

Of course it also does full-service legal work. Because I'm involved, it is specialized in setting up mission protective structures for startups. We have worked really hard to drive the cost of such structures down.

In fact, many of the implementation guides that you can access from the book if you scan the various QR codes were developed in partnership with Virgil. If you want to DIY it, I think we've given you enough information to do so, including sample templates, term sheets, documents, etc. If you prefer a low-cost, flat-fee subscription, Virgil is also there to help you at any time. The URL is tryvirgil.com.

(And you are welcome to use Virgil alongside your established high-prestige high-cost firm, too, if you prefer to do that. It will still save you considerable amounts of money)

I appreciate that you're being honest about this challenge. In the book, I actually say that one of the problems with our modern economy is that we've created too many ways to make money without creating any value at all, in fact sometimes even by destroying value. When I give this talk in public settings, I'll sometimes have someone yell out "crypto" from the audience. That is how the public perceives the whole sector.

The good news is that we all know that being a bold contrarian is the key to returns. If you can figure out a way to structure your initiative such that it literally cannot betray the public, it literally cannot betray your mission, it literally cannot betray human values, you might be able to create something that people are awfully excited about.

I'm not an academic, so no, I have not done any of these studies, but good news, everyone: other people have. The specific structure of Nova Nordisk is not just a foundation. I think the two-entity structure, where a foundation oversees or governs a for-profit company, is uniquely suited to longevity of a mission precisely because it combines the stewardship orientation of the foundation with the performance orientation of the for-profit subsidiary. The data shows (for what it's worth) that such structures are five or six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to a standard for-profit company. I give examples in the book also of pure foundations that have lost this structure or have lost their mission integrity too. I really think you need both for it to endure.

yes, indeed! not only exploring, but (in the long run) fixing!

this made me laugh, thank you for brightening my day. this is not just humor -- it's therapy.

I love that you asked this question, although, of course, you didn't actually phrase it as a question, because this quote is literally in the book. I addressed this particular misconception as it relates specifically to Costco, because I myself once fell victim to the same misconception.

If you think Costco has endured only because of leadership, because of its strong ethos and its immense size, because you think it's just too big for Wall Street to mess with, you are not correct. My friend, nothing is too big for Wall Street to mess with. Wall Street has tried many times to dismantle Costco's ethos, and every time the unique structure of Costco is what has allowed them to resist.

As the old joke goes, "Very, very carefully."

I used AI extensively in the research, editing, and promotion phases of creating the book (and even shared screen with a few podcast hosts who wanted to see the solveit platform from Answer.AI up close). To be clear, I never let the AI write for me; I am not a fan of "vibe creating" of any kind. Instead, I tried to use the AI to improve my own skills so that the final artifact was better than it would have been before.

I know people are up in arms about this right now, but shouldn't at least some of blame for that fall on the tech industry itself, for how these tools are designed, promoted, and sold? I think in the long run, society will achieve a more healthy equilibrium. But in the meantime, it's gonna be a bit rocky.

I wish I had read that blog post because that is one of the chapters in the new book. I actually think that the phrase "mission-driven" for most companies is a total lie. They are at best "mission-hopeful". In fact, I tried to create a new term for the work that is required: the management system, leadership techniques, and structural elements that are required to 100% align the business model with the mission. I call it "mission drive," as if it was an engine you could install and maintain.

Any time you have a technological change, it's kind of confusing to figure out how it can apply to entrepreneurs. On the one hand, it makes it so much easier to create a new MVP, makes it easier to create distribution and to get connected to customers, to do many of the techniques that lean startup demands. On the other hand, that same capability is now in the hands of thousands or even millions of other people, including other people creating startups to compete with you and the incumbents you're trying to disrupt. It's always an open question whether the so-called attacker's advantage will overcome the so-called defender's advantage with any given technology.

In terms of the thesis of Incorruptible, though, I do think that LLMs in particular should be really, really advantageous for managers and leaders who want to create alignment and coherence within their own company. If there's anything that LLMs are extremely good at, it's summarization. So much of the modern leadership challenge is simply figuring out the answer to the question: what is my organization actually doing right now? That's a summarizing problem.

I recently had the chance to meet Abigail Disney, who has been a very vocal critic of what's happened to her grandfather's ethos. It sounds quite sad.

yeah, this is very much the challenge with writing any kind of business book: the book is frozen in time yet the companies grow and change. I tried really really hard not to put any company up on a pedestal, or even make any forward-looking predictions, but merely to show how each company illustrates a specific concept from the book.

Re: your point about being an author, that has always been my approach, too. For this new book, I took in a metric ton of customer feedback (I had over 600 test readers generate more than 10,000 comments) and it really helped the final product. The challenge, of course, is always how to take in external feedback without losing your vision

I've been a bit reluctant to over-generalize from my own theories, and so am not sure I would want to speculate about how to apply them in a family context.

Thank you for saying that. When I wrote that book, people like you were very much in my mind at the time. I'm really glad to hear you found it useful, even if the people around you didn't understand or support what you were trying to do.

You're quite right. There are many, many problems with the current "best practices" including that many founders wind up with nothing even if the organization succeeds. In fact, one study I cite in the book found that something like 80% of founders of venture-backed companies will no longer be CEO even three years after an IPO.

I've just seen this problem up close and personal for a lot of years in a row. I'm sick and tired of helping people become rich and miserable, creating great companies only for them to be destroyed out of the gates. What is the point of all this carnage? Who is it for?

The book is loaded with examples, I promise.

Let me clarify one thing, though, which is that when we call a company "good" or "bad" we can't mean something like absolutely good or evil. No human enterprise can ever be truly perfect.

So, rather, we have to identify what an organization is trying to do and whether the means it has chosen are actually appropriate to that goal. Then we can judge if the goal is aligned with human flourishing (good) or not (bad), and whether the org is consistent in pursuit of that goal (good) or not (bad), and whether it has the strength to continue (good) or not (bad).

it's funny, people constantly criticize LTSE because it hasn't made "enough" progress (you can see one such example already on HN below). But since nobody has ever done anything remotely like this before, I am not sure how we are supposed to judge how much progress it "should" have made by now.

and since everyone widely agrees that what we are attempting is "impossible" I am pretty impressed that we've managed to make any progress at all :)

You can just watch Lenny's Podcast and you'll see how those principles are alive and well :)

I hate the word "exit" altogether. It's only the investors who are leaving Middle Earth; the rest of us are still try to make this thing work.

I address your question in much more detail in the book, using examples as varied as Mondragon in Spain, John Lewis Partnership in the UK, and Vanguard and credit unions here in the US.

We actually have pretty good evidence that these other structures are more resilient and more stable than the classic "best practices" we have all been indoctrinated into.

Unfortunately, most of us have been told that these approaches are incompatible. You either go "big" and try to make a lot of money, have investors, have a grand vision, etc. Or you go "small" and do something "ethical" and non-extractive. So many of us have been taught that it is the fate of the small to be destroyed by the big, since they are more ruthless and more powerful.

But the evidence doesn't really support this just-so story. My goal with the book is to help those who want to build mission-driven companies to realize that this is a source of strength, not weakness, and act accordingly.