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All we have to do is apply this same parable to the "engineering" of organizations, and you'll be on the right track.

Vanity metrics strike again. Danger, Will Robinson!

You're going to find this hard to believe, but actually, mission-driven companies tend to outperform their conventional counterparts. The problem is that financial gravity tends to destroy them before they can become bona fide competitors. In the book, I mostly focus on what we as leaders can do to protect our organizations from this force. Of course, it'd be nice if the people who make market-related policy were busy trying to encourage and inspire and incentivize long-term thinking instead of short-term thinking. That would make all of our lives so much easier and so much better.

Yes, I use AI quite a lot, and I worry a lot about the effect that technology is having on me. Luckily, I have the advantage of using a tool called Solve It from the company I helped found called Answer.ai with Jeremy Howard that is explicitly designed for human-in-the-loop creation of artifacts and the development of human skills even while you use AI. Otherwise, it's likely that LLMs will cause your own skills to atrophy. You can learn more at solve.it.com

Thank you and thank you!

100% the same. Some people see this as the darkness at the heart of the for-profit sector metastasizing and affecting the other sectors. I think that's a reasonable first approximation of what's going on. But in the book, I tried to make a more intellectually complete case that part of the issue is that our current distinctions that we make between, for example, for-profit and non-profit, are intellectually incoherent. That might be part of the problem, too.

Then I'm going to call this a marketing success story. In all seriousness, Thank you.

I don't remember the exact number, but I read somewhere that when Jack Dorsey announced a 40% layoff and claimed it was being caused by AI, his personal net worth went up something like $2 billion. When we outsource judgment to what "the market" wants, this is the result.

I am confident that if you read the book to the end, you will not only know the answer to this question, you will even know what we can do about it.

Yes, I'd be happy to help you. Just drop me an email, and I can connect you to a variety of resources that might be stage appropriate for you.

I would say that learning is still the biggest bottleneck and the one thing that can never be outsourced.

You need to learn the parable of picking up dimes in front of the steam roller, which I think originally is attributed to Jean-Louis Gasset, the founder of BOS. The idea is that in a genuine platform war (which in the tech industry we haven't had for a while), new business opportunities are kind of like little dimes you see in the street in front of a giant platform steam roller. If you're agile enough, you can jump into the street, grab the dime, and jump out. In fact, you can do it repeatedly. The only problem is that if you stumble and fall once, you die.

There used to be a lot of wisdom in the entrepreneurial ecosystem about how to survive such a platform in a more durable way. For example, if you own the customer, then you can play the major platforms off against each other. Or, if you study the case, for example, of Intuit, which survived the attempt of Microsoft to absorb that product feature into their own platform monopoly at the time, there are lessons to be learned. But of course, every platform war is different, and I'm sure there will be new lessons that we will learn from this one.

Don't think you need anything like polygon or tokens for this. I think you just have to have the courage to ask investors to play the proper role within the governance of your company and, frankly, have the business results such that they are willing to accept those terms.

Yes, that's right. But I also think that business can be the catalyst for getting us out of this mess too, because ultimately, mission-driven companies are a source of tremendous and surprising power.

Most? I don't think that can quite be right. But I do think the stuff I'm writing about has held up pretty well through many, many cycles of boom and bust. In fact, Steve Blank has a great new essay out about the coming crash and how ideas in the new book might be useful in helping us reorganize our economy afterwards, kind of the same way The Lean Startup did after the dot-com crash.

Honestly, there hasn't been that much pushback, and I've done something like 200 interviews for the book. I think it might have to do with the fact that we all secretly kind of agree with this thesis, even though we know we're not supposed to say so out loud. I'm sure there will be some pushback coming, especially if the book starts to become more popular or gets more famous.

Though I did get a pretty funny piece of pushback on one consulting company's podcast. The person said, "But wait a second, I learned in business school that everything you're saying here is wrong. Are you asking me to rethink that?" Something like that. I said, "Well, are you interested in looking at the evidence that what I'm saying is the truth?"

I think he was really genuinely struggling, because I don't think he was that interested. Many of us are not that interested in seeing the evidence that the things we believe or were taught are not quite true.

Q2: shareholder primacy is a bad idea on its own terms, as I lay out in the book. It doesn't prevent people from adopting any of governance structures I recommend, it just makes it more difficult, by creating career incentives that add friction to doing the right thing. That's partly why it's so value-destroying.

Q3: I don't understand this question, sorry. Maybe it's because I've spent many lonely years being berated for this subject matter and am only getting the sympathetic treatment lately...

An entrepreneur I used to admire a great deal was once described to me this way: "So and so doesn't do what's right. He makes whatever he does right." Ever since I heard that phrase, I haven't been able to unsee it in so many founders who I think sincerely want to do the right thing, but their ego gets in the way.

I don't have the link in front of me, but someone who used to work at Spotify wrote a really nice reflection about this change through the lens of incorruptible over on LinkedIn. If someone can find it and post it here, that'd be great. If not, I'll try to remember to come back and post it later.

I think these changes very rarely have to do with what customers want shifting, but when people say "the market," they are often confused about whether they're talking about customers or our financial markets. Frankly, it's far more often for this kind of correction to originate in the pressure from financial markets than any other single source.

Thank you and good luck!

Well, there is a reason that I left after all. What's funny is that, although IMVU is today mostly famous because it appears in "The Lean Startup," many of the people who were there at the time were quite annoyed with me and found the ideas grating or even irritating. It reminds me of that old quote that "nobody is a prophet in their own hometown." Well, that kind of happened to me.

What happened in the years since? I don't really know. The company has not been in close touch with me, so I can only speculate or guess.

I'd encourage you to study the story of Tony's Chocolonely. I included a version of that story in chapter 12 of the new book.

Tony's make some of the most delicious chocolate in the world, but their mission is actually to eradicate child slavery in the production of cocoa. I bring this up because before Tony's, it was widely assumed that "the market" didn't care about child exploitation. They just wanted delicious chocolate. Yet Tony's found a way to prove that this was not true.

The more general lesson is that many of the stories we tell ourselves about "what the market wants" are mere fabrications or just-so stories designed to make us feel better about how crappy our alternatives are. Sometimes it just takes a bold entrepreneur to show us that we already collectively are committed to a different set of ideals. We've just never had the opportunity to vote with our wallets to make it happen.

Yes, I do think this is something that LLMs should be very good at. As I've said in a couple of the comments in the thread, summarizing is LLMs' greatest superpower. But I have a whole chapter in the book about the use of metrics and, of course, their misuse. I'd be very cautious here. Government reformers have often assumed that just having better data will cause agencies to make better decisions, but this is simply not true. The choice about which data to pay attention to, whether to make decisions in a scientific or humane way, are values questions, not just data questions. They require the installation of a specific ethos in the organization to stay true to those values. Without that, more data will not have any effect whatsoever.

You've framed this question as if these things are separate phenomena, but from my point of view, they are all symptoms of the same underlying cause. The sad truth is that, as I say in the book, "It's always too early until it's too late." The truth is we don't ever know if something is too late until we try. If you love an organization and you think you have the opportunity to try to help them get better, go for it. If you decide they've abandoned their ethos, I definitely think you should help support and build the alternative.

For reasons I try to explain in the book, open source in particular is an example of the kind of mission-driven positive externality type of business that our modern best practices make it hard for people to see and understand. This is going to be a recurring problem in the free software and open source movements for years to come unless we get smarter about these forces.

I want to appreciate you for this comment, even though I disagree with it, because this is a really articulate version of the conventional wisdom that I think all of us have imbibed since before we could talk.

Your comment is very astute. A structure is like a shell. It can only protect what is within. It does not cause what's within to be vital, healthy, or unhealthy. But if you think that the courage that Dario has regularly shown would be possible with a conventional "best practices" structure, I think you're kidding yourself.

Luckily, many of us publish in many places other than Amazon, and in fact the best way to support any author is to buy the book from your local independent bookstore. In fact, if you want to do me a big favor, you'll call your local independent bookstore, ask them if they carry the book, and if they don't, berate them for not doing so. But please do it in a polite way. In all seriousness, I actually made a list of bookstores that are selling the book that are not part of the big chains, and you can find all that on my website, incorruptible.co.

Yes, it's called today's governance "best practices." Many of them are actually quite value-destroying, and founders should run for the hills every time they hear that phrase.

I expect many of these so-called AI-only companies will actually involve quite a few humans. I think the general idea that AI could be really useful at helping an organization stay true to the mission or purpose in its charter is quite right. Although I still think, at the end of the day, humans should be in the loop and not just as an accountability sink, but really truly providing the creativity, the vision, and the direction of the whole organization.

There's a whole chapter on this question in the new book, so I won't try to summarize it here, but just encourage you to check it out.

I wrote a whole book about it :)