If you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend the Knapp Commission Report. Its about police corruption in New York City in 1972, but its lessons on systemic and institutionalized corruption are highly transferable to other contexts.

Probably the most common naive mistake I see is people thinking their subfield is special and they are the first to really notice / understand fraud within it. I've certainly seen people in the "sleuth community" (scientific fraud whistle blowers) reinvent the wheel a few times.

All fraud is basically the same. Financial, scientific, police corruption...it almost doesn't matter. I'm not even the first to say this. A really good summary can be found in Ashforth 2003 ("The Normalization of Corruption in Organizations").

So, with the caveat that I haven't read your work yet and maybe you already know, I'd say look at past corruption far outside your area of interest / expertise. There's a lot you can learn there. Police corruption reports are usually great because of how accessible they are in several senses (more numerous, usually simple to understand), but I have no police related agenda to push here and it really doesn't matter where you decide to look. Just pick any Commission and read their findings.

In the opening words of the Knapp Commission "We found corruption to be widespread".

The argument that “AI runs so quickly” reminds me of the American manufacturing technique of making a machine lunch out widgets whether they were needed or of not to maximise throughput. As any lean practitioner knows this leads to multiple additional wastes including excess work in progress and wasted movement.

How do you see this principal lines up with current AI arguments?

how a handful of companies (like Costco[..]) have successfully been structured to resist gravity

"I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty," Jelineck recalled[..]. "We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you."

That's not structure, that's leadership. They were about to change the price, but one guy at the top with authority and an opinion said no. You could say "it's structure" that there was one guy at the top with authority, but it still depends on him having the right opinion. You need both a good structure and an unwaveringly idealistic (and correct) leader.

That said, you seem to have archetypes above Costco, Patagonia, and Novo Nordisk that avoided it.

Can you comment on not what it takes to build such a company, but rather how to transform companies like those that I worked for into ones that resist gravity? Or is it too late?

I wrote a blog post called "Revenue Model is More Important than Culture" (it made the #1 spot on HackerNews a few years ago) arguing that the way to avoid that corruption is by making sure the business model is immune to it, but having read your thoughts, I'd say your argument (structure being the dominant term) is even stronger.

As I read through your comments, one question popped into my head: what’s your thoughts about the Friedman doctrine? Do you address it in your book?

Specifically, the Friedman doctrine makes the argument that the social responsibility of the firm is to increase its profits. That policy making should be left to governments.

Milton Friedman states in his essay:

Insofar as [a business executive's] actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.

His theory was introduced in 1970 and it seems has since become the standard for the corporate world

How does this square with what you present in your book? Do you disagree with his theory?

You can also see the various accolades, reviews, and awards that it's accumulated so far.

What do you say to this interpretation? In particular do you think most cases could be framed as "the key audience/customer/market has shifted"? Is it possible to find greater financial success while doing things the primary audience doesn't like?

Mondragon, the Basque worker cooperative network founded by a Catholic priest after the Spanish Civil War, employs 90,000 people and is one of Spain's largest companies, spanning industrial equipment and grocery retail. Internally it is a network of roughly 80 to 90 independent cooperatives that self-govern through a congress of representatives. Ries uses it as a data point rather than a template: collectively, what he calls "alternative structures" (cooperatives, mutual ownership models, long-term benefit trusts) control roughly 5% of world GDP. His point is that most founders have never been given permission to even consider these options, not that every founder should replicate Mondragon.

When founders raise the idea of mission-protective governance structures early, lawyers and bankers typically tell them it's too soon. Then, by the time it matters, the control has already shifted. Ries has watched this play out repeatedly, including once in a room where a CEO turned to their CFO, GC, and bankers and asked whatever happened to that mission-protective provision thing — only to be told it was now too late.

Exemplary for how Big Finance tries to keep the levers of powers in the hands of a tiny sliver of elites.

https://www.tbpndigest.com/story/2026-05-26/eric-ries-on-inc...

You used the phrase "our industry". Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the 'tech industry' concept, simply because a lot of startups are not in software/computing, and a lot of new technology isn't either. But I get what people mean.

I notice that the companies you mention like Costco and Patagonia are not in the tech industry. Does your new book have any examples which show how to stay incorruptible in the face of the network effects that drive monopolization in the tech industry? Alternatively, have you seen workable ways to split network effects amongst networked affiliates, to spread out the market power?

I know that most founders aren't exactly looking to make a startup with a lot of competition (I'm sure not), but it would be nice to know if someone is fixing problems specific to the 'tech industry'.

I do attribute a lot to specific people. Concretely, to much of the intitial team, who they recruited on the research/infra side, and some very close personal relationships within research/infra. That dynamic, paired with their unwillingness to accede to something against their values, is what I credit for some atypical decisions and outcomes [1].

Things regulary go "corrupt" in parts of the company; it's hard to scale without importing culture from big tech. Sometimes, the defense was ICs escalating issues, Dario talking to ICs, and then shaking things up.

But this process takes time, and it doesn't lead to a full reversal; a bad/misaligned hire has reverberating impacts. Many folks are still driven by values (even if their values are not your values!), but scaling dynamics seem to be evolving like any other org – just at a higher employee count and revenue numbers.

I do place trust in specific people who work at Anthropic, but I wouldn't place trust in Anthropic the organization. It's an organization that's wont to change, regardless of its structure.

[1]: https://smackernews.com/item/47174423 HN

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/good-to-great-jim-col...

I listened to a podcast interview you did where you talked positively about the Novo Nordisk Foundation as a successful governance story, but when I think of long lived foundations, I think of the Ford Foundation and the Hewlet Foundation that have significantly drifted from the founders' visions despite being non-profits. Many people think it is better for foundations to spend down all their resources before the founder is gone to prevent this drift and loss of efficacy.

Have you done any studies of what made long lived foundations drift on their mission despite no profit incentive?

a book like this should be 20-25 CAD max specially since its clearly a pop corn read .. "I won't pretend I have this all figured out" .. I don't think anyone should pay 43 CAD to read you thinking out loud (the lean startup is 25 CAD by the way, with a 10% discount)

if ever it goes on discount on amazon, maybe

One question I have for you is on finances, I think that still remains an afterthought in startup hustle culture, and perhaps even by design, I feel like the system is designed so that VCs keep winning and founders rarely get the exit they deserve. What is your take on that?

It was a big influence on me and something I recommend and quote often.

I'm curious if your perspectives on the topics of "The Lean Startup" have changed I the era of AI tools. Particularly curious what you think about the role of MVPs to test a market.

This has been on my mind the past few weeks because of a recent experience during a company hackathon:

A few years ago I gave a talk about prototyping and MVPs at the Audio Developers Conference and in this talk to explain the concept of an MVP I proposed a silly idea for an audio plug-in (that replaces a singers voice with the sound of flamingos) as a demonstration of how we might test that there is a market for this plug-in before building it. I gave some examples of how we could test this like a landing page MVP, concierge MVP, etc.

Recently during the two days of this company hackathon I was too busy to do a project of my own because I was helping on-board colleagues with Claude and getting sucked into some leadership meetings. During the demos meeting I decided to try to build my voice replaced with flamingos plug-in and built a working plug-in in under two hours and this got me thinking:

If I can build a real functioning plug-in that a user can try in their host application in less than two hours why would I use non-software MVPs to test a market when I can build working software just as fast or faster than I could setup a non-software MVP a few years ago.

Of course there is more to learn from "lean" than just MVP (I'm also a big fan of the andon cord and the 5 why's)

(to anyone commenting on vibe coding I looked at the code and while not all of it was ideal I wouldn't consider this "vibe coded" and for serving the purpose of an MVP a couple things in the code that were a little funny are not a problem)

Do you have any recommendations for entity formation infra that caters to mission driven companies? Something like Stripe Atlas that can form the more complex structures? Forming a PBC is becoming more standard but tthe other structures seem more esoteric (and expensive).

While this is good while the founder is alive, it sort of begs the question how long will the company that has structure like that run after the founder is gone. I believe it could go to some family foundation that controls the company, but I guess that is still prone to corruption.

I think that there are a lot of interesting examples in gaming industry - founders start something and they are pushed from the company due to acquisition or by the shareholders. Let us not forget hostile takeovers too.

As for startups - I think that it depends a lot from where you come from. For example, being in Europe, Serbia, it is a lot harder to bootstrap startup or to find investors. The best bet is organizing startup as a C corp in Delaware via something like Stripe Atlas in order to get (hopefully) some foreign investors interested. Investors here want to extract value before there is one there, which is a short term thinking. This in turn lead to risk aversion, opening the country for outsourcing model which is now collapsing and where there is small percentage of product based companies.

What do you think an experiment needs before it can actually be called learning? And what kinds of product questions should not be done as experiments at all?

Was it "financial gravity" that made the decision at Google to cheat at the ad exchange?

Was it "financial gravity" that made the decision at DuPont to dump toxic sludge in the environment and make unsafe products?

Or perhaps was it just a group of immoral people chasing more personal gain and wealth?

Humans are too weak and too easily corrupted by wealth, power and shiny things and our political and economic systems place way too much power in the hands of fallible individuals. I expect it to be our downfall.

First, the organization must have an original steering body made up of "true believers" in a shared mission and vision. This body must make preventing the short or long term erosion or dilution of its mission a priority. Meaning that there's awareness that this particular corruption is a possibility from the start. Also, an understanding of the typical mechanisms through which it can happen (usually very human).

Second, as part of its survival strategy the steering body has the responsibility to identify other genuine true believers and integrate them in its makeup. There must be built-in assumptions that many outsiders will be attracted to its powers of influence and will try to infiltrate it.

Joining the steering council should thus be done primarily based on "culture fit". Admittedly a rather segregating practice, but one which in this case comes with the advantage that certain signals are just hard to fake on the long run. So, although many could try to dress, look, talk, or walk the part for a while, there will always be some shibboleth that trips up impostors.

I foresaw some problems to this structure that I haven't yet worked out, but it feels like a step in the right direction, if I had to come up with a solution.

If so, how is the tradeoff justified? (Make money first, then do "ideal" things?)

If not, why not? (Other than that it's unsuccessful strategically/statistically and wasteful, I guess.)

Any elaboration/response on this theme would be appreciated. Thanks!

What can a founder do to safeguard his position, interests, and company? A couple of things that come to my mind are: have an aligned/friendly board who believe in you; second, have dual-class shares (like Meta, SpaceX, Google). Anything else you would like to add?

I read the book last night. While the topic is important, I was disappointed in the content and format of the book. Scatterbrained. Some of the most important questions get a page of content. Scores of offhand comments and examples that get no serious treatment, sometimes contradictory. The topic would have been better served with less examples.

Incorruptible sounds interesting - I've long thought about how much companies and their output are defined by their social structures. Microslop doesn't produce broken software because they hire stupid or evil people for example.

I like the phrase "financial gravity" as a way to frame the phenomenon in a way that avoids the darker (and broader) connotations of "corruption". At Humanitix we spend a lot of time thinking about this, and have much respect for the likes of Patagonia, Thank You, and others. We took the "charity path" so to speak, which has been both challenging and rewarding. Watching OpenAI's charity orbit decay into IPO fireball has been somewhat depressing, but I think it highlights one of the keys to our own continued success in resisting the pull; we don't need much in the way "capital" from the "ism". We don't need to build data centres, or produce and warehouse goods.

Having said that I don't mean it to undermine your points of "strong ethos". Simply existing in the tech world as a charity takes great strength of ethos. Try explaining to AWS that you should be eligible for "start up credits", but no, you don't have "investors" to prove you're going to the moon.

So I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that so few other companies have tried low-overhead tech start ups as charities. The ecosystem works against it in many ways, but it has become one of our missions to prove that it can work as a business model.

Anyway, thanks for the book (and this thread). I'll be passing it around on the work Slack.

I'm curious if you think cooperative businesses leveraging non-voting preferred shares, community shares and other coop investment instruments are more resilient against this type of corruption.

I'm wonder how you see the tradeoffs these models have against traditional LLC/VC models and how you would mitigate them.

Why do you think IMVU never hit escape velocity?

Q1: You have done a few friendly interviews on YouTube, but I haven't seen one that challenges you much. Do you know if there are upcoming interviews that you found pushed back?

Q2: Is the idea of shareholder supremacy fundamentally at odds with your with your preferred alternative governance structures, or is it just a time preference and risk attitude issue?

Q3: You will get sympathetic ears easily due to the subject matter. But the same book about non-profits would be a harder sell. Do you agree, and if true does that say something about the marketplace of ideas?

co-founded an AI R&D lab called Answer.AI with Jeremy Howard

How is Jeremy Howard doing? I remember studying machine learning with his videos, he’s been so inspiring!

Now, here is my question. I personally got disappointed in how most “early” and “small” startups operate. I have short experience to be fair but their sole goal seems to be how to get funds and grants and how to get higher valuation. They didn’t have visions and sustainability in mind. It felt like they are doing gambling rather than running a business. What do you think of this and how would you explain?

Jokes aside - can’t wait. Your book The Lean Startup helped me so much. I read it tens of times. It’s one of the reason I got great traction with mine startup https://playcode.io - AI App Builder on our custom cloud.

Thank you Eric.

IMHO we are dealing with a cultural domination movement centered around authoritarianism and its engulfing everything. The business world is being used as a weapon wielded against the world, I don't think this is a leadership problem, its a problem with selfishness and whats going on in the heart.

It used to feel completely different a decade ago, no teenagers that couldn't care less, now few of them seem to care.

Tyre centre moved to bookings only but you can't call because there's never anyone on the tyre desk. I know because it's always unattended whenever I walk past.

Gas station staff just chat to each other and put out the traffic cones 30 mins before close leaving a small gap.

Everyone now has to scan their card with a single scanner leaving a huge queue outside just to get in.

Register queues go right down to the back of the warehouse with half the registers closed.

Queue again to get your receipt checked and all you get is departing grunt if you're lucky.

It's sad because I used to rave about Costco and bring the cool new snacks to share at work.

Prices are mostly comparable at the grocery store if you are willing to wait until they go on special so I've given up on Costco.

Anyway, my question is - Have you had a chance to research OpenAI and it's path to getting "corrupted" i.e. going from Non-profit to this weird structure to then, what it looks like, absolutely regular for-profit company? whats your take on it? what are the lessons of the convoluted company structure they persuaded?

How often do you see companies recover from financial gravity? Or is it mostly irreversible?

How much do you attribute worsening of company values to things like professional managers, too much hierarchy, and less founder-mode; versus financial gravity?

In a case like GitHub where their focus seems less on open-source these days, should developers try to help GitHub better support open-source or should the focus be on building alternatives?

Thanks, Jake

1. Who lack a legitimate business model hence have resorted to "data collection from/about computer users, surveillance of computer users even when engaged in non-commercial activity and online advertising services" with generally free, so-called "products" and "services" offered as bait

"There's a darkness in our industry that we often don't talk about."

It's "talked" about on HN but voters and commenters working for or aspiring to start/work for these companies don't like the discussion

100% probability this comment will be greyed out to try to hide it from people using graphical web browsers (no effect on monochrome text-only browser users)

The people that start "tech" companies are often soulless and maladapted to society, having hid behind computers to escape their inability to deal with the real world. There are also "tech startups" founded by people who want to take advantage of those who have hidden behind computers and lack social skills, using them as pawns

These founders and pawns do not start, nor do they want to work for, companies like Costco, Patagonia or Novo Nordisk because they only believe in what they see on a computer screen not the real world. They want to operate in Silicon Valley fantasy land

It really isn't surprising what happens to so-called "tech" companies over time considering what they start from

The author worked for Kleiner Perkins, SillyCon Valley VC

After listening to this guy you may feel like you need a shower

How do you think Lean Startup principles could be applied to ordinary families looking to navigate the existing economic stresses we're experiencing?

You've probably talked about this before, but with AI speeding up product "delivery" (especially prototypes), what changes have you seen to the lean startup methodology? Is it possible to supercharge the build measure learn loop?

And what good uses for AI have you seen to keep teams "building things people want"?

How do you resolve the difference between the short term nature of the lean startup, and the long term optimistic nature of LTSE?

Do those questions need a foundation on which they stand to be answered? What is that foundation (are there relative foundations or are they by definition absolute?)?. Is there a moral standard that those handful of companies share? Similar to “success factors”, are there “success ethics” in your perspective?

What would be the elements of success ethics that others can learn from?

Whats your criteria? Is there an analytical component? Are you willing to work on something even if "success" is unlikely? And with all of this going on how do you have time to work on books!

thank you for your work by the way. It continues to be useful year after year to me and people around me!

How much do you blame our values of our society for creating corrupt businesses? Are corrupt businesses just a mirror of our own values?

I would like to know how best to stand out from the toxic, finance-driven world that is defi and crypto generally, without getting rolled in with all the clowns. Of course, I know that clear messaging and verifiable, evidence-driven claims are good, but I am thinking about the more abstract, strategic side to things, which I still feel under-prepared for.

How do you feel about these AI only companies, and how do you think they could affect the wider market?

ref: https://www.ft.com/content/b8cc4bf4-6d3c-4974-8428-9a091983c...

How do you imagine companies with staying power will be shaped in the future? Will we see new paradigms in management? ie smaller teams, jack of all trade types of individuals vs specialists, potentially the elimination of middle management all together

Do you have advice on how to use AI to help teams stay true to their values?

Having not read your book yet, in my mind there's the obvious legal support AI can provide to help navigate complex situations, but maybe there's some other groundwork in the value creation and implementation itself?

Serious question: I find that the core issue in corruption, and the corruptibility of an individual and then the groups they are a member relies on plain spoken communication skills, and the ability or inability of an individual to protect themselves from self deception.

A "uncorrupt person" does not choose to be corrupt, they lie to themselves with little corruptions until "it is too late" and then with no (self assessed) alternative they commit to their situation.

As well as a group of people knowingly engaged in less than ethically honest activities must impress their ethical failures on all their peers, to insure their safety if the corruption is exposed, and they then bully their uncomprehending peers into corruption.

All of this is caused to the educational hole that is effective communications: people are not taught how to identify honest and dishonest self conversation, people are not taught how to communicate without information mistakes they refuse are mistakes, omissions of critical information, and then deferment of blame when half considered strategies are met by complex reality.

I've been working in tech, at all levels, since the 70's. The #1 characteristic of every single organization I have been a member and interacted with is poor communications, weak documentation, and nobody able to discuss the topics at hand without technical pretension, omissions, misdirections, and misinformation.

This nonsense is all due to no real emphasis on communicating to mutual understanding anywhere in the verticals of technical and science educations. And that includes the communications in people's heads that drive them to comforting non-solutions they attempt and fail.

Where does Apple fall on the Incorruptible spectrum? Is it covered in the book?

It's already been 14+ years since you wrote the book; I wonder if a second edition is something you have in mind, or at least on your consideration list

(Reading Joseph Pearson's book on the Berlin airlift, in which he features prominently, do your last name stood out...)

With big companies with large budgets bulldozing smaller players - any advice on finding a niche that is worth pursuing?

Let's say this has already happened and ossified across large, formerly-innovative companies that now have so much size and inertia behind them that it might take decades for one to "fail" in a traditional sense. What can be done to reverse the process?

Okay, I know these questions don't seem like good faith engagement — but it actually is hard for me to separate decisions like these from my assessment of whether a book like this is worth my time! (And you did say to ask you anything...)

I've noticed that VCs try very hard to separate the world into "VCs + founders" and "everyone else" and that the more time a founder spends in the VC+founders bubble the more distorted their worldview can become.

You said to "Ask You Anything," so here's my question: I have mostly stopped buying from Amazon. That includes books. I'd like to buy your next book. What's the best way to support you if I don't want to purchase through them? More generally, what's the best way to support authors that _only_ publish on Amazon without supporting Amazon itself?

Basically, you appear to be focusing on investor owned companies and missing the entire class of worker cooperatives where the financial gravity you're talking about isn't merely resisted -- it doesn't exist. These companies have other challenges, to be sure, but if you're going to write a book called "Incorruptible" talking about businesses, not including these seems a significant oversight (at the least).

Do you address these in the book and just fail to highlight them here or is this really something you missed entirely?

what are the 'slower' go to market channels that you've seen produce sustainable results also producing sustainable businesses. not the come fast, die fast kind ?

Sounds like an interesting topic!

Why do good companies go bad

I find interesting the systemic explanation of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith in "The Dictator's Handbook"^1: In any publicly traded company, if the executives (or the board) are not ready to do whatever it takes to maximize profit, they will be replaced by people who are. It becomes a selection process creating tyrants. If you're lucky (as employee, customer, or human living on the same planet), whatever it takes might be aligned with employees and customers' interest. When times are bad, whatever it takes has no limits, it becomes a question of survival or progression for business leaders.

I'm curious to see how much that maps with what you identified in your new book! Patagonia is private and under the control of a few benevolent dictators ; Costco and Nordisk are a bit more surprising, I'm keen to know more.

^1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook

Who is the target audience for your books? Is it founders? Or is it for people who want to be founders?

Given the current wave of AI-assisted coding (Claude Code/Codex) and the broader enshittification of SaaS/platforms, do you think B2B SaaS founders now face a new "we can just build this ourselves" problem?

How would you think about testing for that risk early?

Enshittification and maximizing founder/shareholder/c-suite profit?

Sometimes clients asked IDEO to design under this shitty-MVP model (we generally refused), other times we were brought in to clean it all up.

Why do you think the concept of "MVP" was almost universally misunderstood? And, thinking about Incorruptible, how did the best companies out there internalize it?

I'm curious how you would think about this situation from the lean startup perspective. With hardware products, if you don't do lots of initial testing, the scale of problems might not become apparent for years. You can't just fix a problem with a software patch.

I've always find it an interesting dichotomy between their public image, retail worker reputation, and corporate reputation. The former two are fantastic. I live in Seattle metro area where they are headquartered, and the last is horrible.

I've had more than one recruiter tell me it's a classic, blue collar, "we've always done it this way" environment since many of their corporate people rose through the ranks in stores, not tech. As I believe Warren Buffet put it, "every company is a tech company these days," so this creates problems. I met someone at a party there about three years ago tell me a data migration went so poorly, they'll have to use two financial systems for at least ten years because the previous system was homegrown with ancient tech.

As an ENTJ, the later would drive me crazy, and I've declined when recruiters want to talk to me about such and such manager position at Costco.

And how has the traditional loop of validation, delivering and iterating on products, and getting your first paid customers changed since fast output is now possible with AI and technology?

Please structure this for someone with no startup experience, and such that event a child can understand. And please create a version that works for someone to begin to validate their idea right now and measure progress, and modify/iterate towards a goal of money generation for themselves or a team now and long-term. (And would you also describe then how this person can work on attracting a team for someone who has never successfully navigated choosing their own team before.) (And would you also accept my thanks, this is very kind of you)

We've all experienced watching a company we love or admire be warped and broken beyond recognition; until it's a husk of its former self, or worse. I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to know what all of us can do to stop that from happening.

Those who can do, those who can't teach?

They are full of platitudes that sound relevant to people's problems and desires, that pretend to be based on science but have no actual basis in facts, provably do not work, and yet are still popular amongst the people they let down again and again.

Anyone who could write a book with advice that worked the way this purports to would be too rich to need Kickstarter to fund his books, for a start.

>I kept watching good companies drift away from the missions they were founded on. Not because anyone woke up one day and decided to be evil, but because the structure they were built on slowly pulled them there. I call that pull "financial gravity."

Mate, tried as hard as you like, it's called "fundamental laws of capitalism". I understand that won't sell books, and denial does, but c'mon.

> We've all experienced watching a company we love or admire be warped and broken beyond recognition; until it's a husk of its former self, or worse. I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to know what all of us can do to stop that from happening.

Because it's a systemic set of capitalistic incentives, where either you find a way to be ok to forego growth for a different set of non-capitalistic values, which can only work if you're self-bootstrapped and have no investor pressure, or you go the way that making more profit pushes you towards. You can try as hard to reframe the picture, but those are the objective incentives of the capitalistic market, and what you're selling is illusions for entrepreneurs that want to delude themselves away from personal responsibility in order to sleep at night.

> My new book _Incorruptible_ is my attempt to explain the invisible forces that shape organizations, and how a handful of companies (like Costco, Patagonia, and Novo Nordisk) have successfully been structured to resist gravity and thrive for decades -- or even centuries.

LOL, Costco? Really? The only good example here is Patagonia, and it's because they hacked the stakeholder system with a two-entities solution.

Good luck with your book, I'm sure that you'll find enough capitalists that want to hear just another fable to make it successful.