From one piece How Anthropic, Costco, and Patagonia all build incorruptible companies | Eric Ries 24 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
if you want to manage something like as a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present.
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The more ants you put in the puzzle, the faster the solution. But the more humans you add, the worse. Unless the humans are very carefully aligned, this is the key lesson for organizational design.
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corporations, organizations are the oldest form of artificial intelligence on the planet. They are an example of this emergent intelligence.
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This is the number one unsolved problem in AI. It's not the tech. We're making great progress on the technical alignment problem. But we haven't made jack progress on the human alignment problem
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If you say that shareholders should run it, then you're saying literally whoever can borrow the most money should be able to control this technology, it's just that's nuts.
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I looked down the panel and I realized not a single one of these companies has standard governance. That's how bad it is.
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I think the structure frankly is better than founder control. Daio does not have dual class shares the way that Mark Zuckerberg or or Larry and Sergey had.
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korrents.com
The rule for a company's culture is to only ever make deposits and never deliberately make a withdrawal.Their words
this is the rule is really simple. only make deposits. Never make withdrawals. That's it. Because you're going to make withdrawals by accident sometimes because you're gonna make mistakes, but you never intentionally make a withdrawal.
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Their words
It doesn't guarantee that you're the good guys. Okay? Just writing it down doesn't do that much. But it does solve one very specific problem, which is if someone one day sues you saying you breached your fiduciary duty to investors, you could say, "Nope, investors agreed that this is our purpose to do this thing.
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this idea is old enough that we now have a generation of people who have been raised as if this was a natural law. This is how capitalism has always been. But that's wrong. For the vast majority of the time, for hundreds of years, we have had joint stock corporations. Only the last 40 have we had this idea.
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Their words
So if someone tells you, I'm serious about something, great. Now show me the apparatus. Show me the commitments you've made to make sure that happens every time. No exceptions. And if you don't have one, then they are lying to you no matter how good their intentions are.
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Their words
Companies that claim to be missiondriven, most of them are just mission hopeful. Okay? It's it's It's just a candy coating on top of an extractive engine. Sorry, I don't buy it. If you're serious about being missiondriven, you have to show me that you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.
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Their words
The trust that they gained is the reason why they're a 70 billion dollar company today. But most leaders when asked to defend their principles can't do it because they've been taught ROI based thinking.
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Their words
as leaders we get so focused on value statement mission statements we forget the mission statement is not the mission. The map is not the territory. Mission is an emergent property of the living superorganism of the thing we're birthing.
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korrents.com
Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business, and prioritizing by ROI always ranks it last.Their words
Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in all of business. And the things that create trustworthiness by definition stack rank to the bottom if we do it by ROI because doing the right thing has intangible rewards but tangible costs.
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Their words
harder is easier is a principle that says if you're willing to do the work upfront to commit to quality, to design, to ethics, to integrity, to safety, whatever the thing, I don't want to tell you what your values are, you tell me what they are. If you're willing to be principled in your decision-making, you will get these unexpected rewards.
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Their words
did you know that according to the legal documents you yourself signed, your company's literal charter that you have right now, and this is not some hypothetical future thing, you've already put in motion, a rule that says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in this situation.
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Their words
companies with that structure like Novo and Zeiss, they are six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to their conventional counterparts. We they have superior return on invested capital. They make more money for investors.
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korrents.com
The corporate best practices lawyers and bankers push on founders are younger than the trees in the local park.Their words
so many of the best practices that your lawyers, your bankers, whoever advisers you have, they're going to be pushing best practices on you that are younger than the trees in your local park.
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Their words
Was it ever the right time? No, it is never the right time to do this. If you put this off, you will eventually find yourself in a situation where you can no longer do it. You will have lost the leverage. Success will not protect you because success is what makes you a target.
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Their words
According to Harvard Law School, among venturebacked companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, okay, only 20% of founders are still the CEO 3 years after going public.
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Their words
If you don't get this right, no other decision you make about your company will matter for the long term because you're not going to be the one making it.
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Their words
all kinds of famous companies where the thing that destroyed them was not competition. It was not someone else came up with a better product. No, their very success became a liability because the more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher.
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I call it the force that no one controls but everyone obeys that tends to drag organizations down into mediocrity to the point that we lose control of them. Now, sometimes we lose control of them because we get fired.