For The Better - Email 01

For the Better comes to you bi-weekly with ideas about how and why to build companies focused on human flourishing and stories of the people who are doing it. Other enthusiasms may occasionally appear.

Greetings, readers! It's been a while. I've been busy and now seems like the right time to fill you in a little on what I've been up to lately -- and what I'm looking forward to sharing with you.As many of you know, my work with companies began with The Lean Startup, which was published -- this seems impossible -- 13 years ago. As the movement grew, it reached people at enterprise companies who were looking to innovate within structures that had never been set up to do it. This led to another professional era for me, and I spent the following years devising and sharing systems for that use case (which I wrote about in The Startup Way). But something else happened, too. As I travelled around meeting with various corporations all over the country and the world, I began to notice that the overwhelming majority of them shared the kind of culture and incentives centered on short-term thinking that have ultimately been self-destructive for so many companies. It was baffling. Why would anyone willingly buy into a system that has produced the same terrible outcome over and over?My first effort to tackle the issue of short-term profits as an incentive came in the form of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the first exchange to make long-termism a central tenet of its listing standards. But the deeper I got into this work, the more I kept coming back to the companies themselves. I couldn't figure out what made so many of them, even the ones who started out with real purpose, succumb to the same terrible force: putting short-term financial gains ahead of the chance to fulfill their original mission and contribute to creating a better society for everyone.That is where my attention has been focused for the last several years. First on unraveling the mystery from both a cultural and operational perspective, then on sharing what I've learned with founders and companies who want to do something different: pursue their mission wholeheartedly while also making a profit. I've talked to countless people who are committed to upholding the true purpose of their organizations without sacrificing growth and have proved not only that it can be done, but that it's actually a competitive advantage.As the months and years have passed, the number of founders looking for help building a company that won't forgo its purpose for the sake of profit has increased exponentially. This shouldn't be surprising -- after all, what founder ever started a company with the express purpose to sell it out either by choice or necessity? I've made it my own mission to communicate what I've learned to anyone who wants to break free of the current systems. Along the way, I realized there's a vacuum where this information should be, which leads me to a big announcement. I’m launching a new podcast, The Eric Ries Show. Each episode will feature a conversation about the intersection of growth, purpose, and profit. The wide-ranging variety of guests, including people who are already building or working at organizations that operate this way, will, I hope, help spread the message that the organizations we need for a better future are beneficial not just to individual founders or their companies, or even industries, but for the world we all share.As always, I look forward to hearing from all of you about what I'm doing. More to come soon.Eric