May 5, 2026
by Purpose Foundation
Most books tell you how to build something great. Eric Ries' new one asks why so many great things eventually go wrong.
Yesterday, we had the chance to sit down with Eric for a fireside chat on Incorruptible, out on May 26. He's best known as the author of "The Lean Startup," which reshaped how a whole generation of founders thinks about building and scaling companies. With Incorruptible, out at the end of this month, he goes further: not asking how to start, but how to protect what you've built before the wrong forces take over.
We had the chance to read the manuscript and sit down with Eric before the final draft, to give feedback, challenge ideas, and share what we see in our daily work around steward-ownership. That conversation sparked the idea for this fireside chat.
It was brilliant to hear Eric’s perspective on what steward-ownership can offer to the growing number of founders who sense that the current system wasn't built for what they're trying to create.
In case you don't have time to listen to the hour-long conversation, find our three key takeaways here:
One of the most powerful things about Incorruptible is that it makes the case for steward-ownership not from ideology, but from evidence. Eric draws on researchers across disciplines who have reached the same conclusion: “when ownership shifts from stewardship to extraction, institutions fail.”
He tells the story of Novo Nordisk, a large pharmaceutical company set up in the 1920s under a steward-ownership structure, where a nonprofit foundation holds ultimate control over the for-profit company.
In the late 90’s, the for-profit board wanted to sell the company for a large premium – a fully signed merger agreement, ready to go. The nonprofit trustees blocked it. Their question was simple: Why is it necessary for the company and its mission? According to their charter, they could only approve a sale if it was necessary for the survival of Novo Nordisk. And a company that had been profitable and growing 20% a year for a decade didn't meet that bar.
The company they were about to merge with was acquired two years later in what the pharma literature calls a killer acquisition: bought to shut its R&D down. Meanwhile, Novo Nordisk's 13-year research program into what we now call GLP-1 finally bore fruit. They became the inventors of Ozempic. From the moment the trustees said no to that merger, to the moment Novo Nordisk's market cap exceeded the GDP of Denmark, they had created more than $500 billion in shareholder value.
Bottom line: without the structural integrity of its steward-ownership model, Novo Nordisk would have been sold, its research shut down, and Ozempic would never have existed.
Eric told a story about H-E-B, a very popular regional grocery store in Texas. During an ice storm, the power went out at one of their stores. Customers stood in the aisles with full carts, unable to pay while the storm was raging outside.
The store manager gathered everyone and said: just take your carts and go home. People were so surprised and touched, they wept in the aisles.
Most people hearing this story assume it was a brave manager who went rogue. Eric's point was the opposite. H-E-B drills for this. They teach it as their responsibility. So the store manager did not act out of courage, they acted out of culture. A culture built on the idea that the company exists to take care of its customers, full stop. Eric describes this as a fundamental reorientation: away from making money by any means necessary, and towards making money by doing as much mission as possible.
This story resonated deeply with us – because our work around steward-ownership builds on a certain picture of human nature. It is based on the belief that if individuals are given full responsibility and placed in the right conditions (aka ownership structure), they will act pro-socially. The idea that humans are inherently selfish or bad has dominated for decades – and so many systems are built on that assumption. If the ownership structure of a company enables its employees the freedom to act responsibly, on each level of management decision in a company, the company earns something no marketing budget can buy: genuine trust and authenticity.
While H-E-B is not exactly steward-owned (but has a family-ownership structure combined with part employee-ownership for the detailed-interested among you), the learning from this story is clear: the freedom to act well has to be built in, not hoped for.
One core idea from Eric that we keep coming back to is blunt: The ability to experiment with organizational forms is one of the oldest things humans have ever done – we have been building systems with different ideas about how power should be shared since before we had language for it. In essence, we are lawgivers.
Eric pointed out that shareholder primacy – the idea that a company exists solely to maximise shareholder value – was never voted on. No referendum, no legislative process. It was introduced by a small group of elites, relatively recently, and has since been treated as if it were a law of nature.
But it isn't. Eric is clear that without comprehensive alignment of mission, ethos, and structural integrity, even the best companies eventually succumb. Good intentions and a strong leader are not enough. What you need, as he puts it, is a system of mission protection that does not depend on any one individual.
We often think of corporate ownership as something fixed – something scientifically determined or inevitable. But steward-ownership, at its core, opens up the space to find the right legal structure for what you actually want to create in the world. If your perspective is that a company should exist to increase shareholder value, that's fine – there are plenty of legal forms for that. But if you're seeking something different, steward-ownership offers an alternative. It moves away from the idea of wealth ownership and replaces it with stewardship.
And in a world where it's considered normal – sometimes even noble – for companies to grow individual wealth as their central purpose, stepping away from that can open up a tremendous amount of freedom. It opens room for trust and holds potential for relationships with stakeholders. It allows you to ask: What is the mission I want to serve? What kind of impact do I want to have in the world? You're no longer operating under the automatism that you exist to increase shareholder value. You get to fill that space with whatever truly aligns with your intention.
That's the beauty of it. And why we believe steward-ownership is freedom.
Eric's book Incorruptible comes out on May 26th in the US. We are really excited to soon hold it in our hands.
