Lead the People · 2026-05-28 · 34 min
Most businesses assume staying profitable means staying on mission. But for Eric Ries, creator of The Lean Startup and author of the new book Incorruptible , the real threat to any great company isn't a bad quarter, it's the slow, systemic loss of the thing that made it worth building in the first place. In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits down with Eric to dig into why good companies go bad, why trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business, and how our conventional definition of profit has been quietly destroying value for decades. Eric challenges the idea that greed is just a personality flaw, making the case that most corporate decline is structural and entirely preventable. Together, they explore what it actually means to be mission-driven, why shareholder primacy is a recent invention and not a natural law, and how leaders can build organizations strong enough to resist the forces that corrupt them.
#178 Burnout Is Not a Personal Failure (feat. Elizabeth Rosenberg)61 / 100#177 The Real Cost of Broken Trust (feat. Yolanda K. Davis)#176 Storytelling Skills That Set Managers Apart (feat. Johanna Walker)#175 What Executives Decide Behind Closed Doors (feat. Julian Lighton)#174 Escaping the Fear-based Leadership Trap (feat. Justin Ricklefs)