From the Desk of Eric Ries

September 2018

"There’s a real human pattern at the core that we all should have a certain amount of empathy for. We’re all in favor of innovation in theory. But in practice, we do everything we know how to return life to whatever’s familiar and whatever’s worked for us in the past. We all need to learn to change our rate of change and embrace things that are unfamiliar."

That's a quote from Larry Keely, president and co-founder of Doblin, Inc, an innovation strategy firm, who has more than four decades of experience working with big companies (like Target, American Express, Sony, Whirlpool and Apple) invested in changing their approach to innovation. It's just one of many interesting moments in this episode of Futuresquared. He also talks about the problem of "new-fangled innovation theater," how changing company culture is really about changing incentives, protocols, and processes--what he calls "installing the right kind of plumbing"--and a lot more.As always, I'm also including a few conversations and discussions about my own work, and some other pieces I spent some time with in the last month.I hope something here catches your attention, too. I’m always glad to get recommendations, so if there are things you think I should be reading, send them to: [email protected]

And, one final announcement:

This year's Lean Startup Conference

, runs from November 14-16 in Downtown Las Vegas. I'm really looking forward to speaking with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, and also to attending many of the other great events and panels we have planned. You can find all the details and register here.

[Conversations]Are Fat Rounds Eating the Lean Startup?

Entrepreneur Christie Whitehill Shares Her Top Startup Tips

Seven Books Every Event Manager Should Read to Advance Their Careers6 business gurus, startup founders and tech CEOs reveal their best advice to a 20-year-old self

[Readings]

Privatizing PovertyA bracing look at two new books on poverty in America, Not A Crime to Be Poor and The Poverty of Privacy Rights. It concludes that, "Taken together, they make a persuasive case for the idea that securing the most basic of individual rights for all in our society in fact demands a complete overhaul of our existing institutions."The rise of giant consumer startups that said no to investor money"A blueprint for a new path for ambitious direct-to-consumer entrepreneurs has emerged, one that has turned recent conventional wisdom in tech circles on its head even as it follows old-school business rules: Sell differentiated products for more than it costs to make and market them, and reinvest the profits in the business if you want to grow faster."Welcome to Armageddon!

On the game Armageddon MUD, a part of "one of the first great waves of virtual-world proliferations," which holds as its ideal, "a fully emergent narrative—a single, seamless world, internally coherent and without limits, shaped from player-character decisions and carefully concealed mechanics by an invisible hand."The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws

An experiment in "participatory governance" in an unlikely place.

The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?A look at "the first detailed empirical investigation of the Peter Principle" undertaken by a group of economists. What is the Peter Principle? Nothing more, and nothing less, that the old idea that “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.â€Mutiny at the big five is part of the future of work

A warning call about how big companies are "outgrowing their founding values," leading to internal dissent from people who "are seeing their companies change as they go from high-growth to territory defense mode [and] aren’t happy about it, especially when the companies act in conflict with the companies’ stated values or the employees’ personal values. They haven’t forgotten they were recruited on some promise like ‘we’re different, we really care’. Now they’re coming knocking to cash that check."