Eric Ries
Incorruptible by Design
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Ries will be hosted by Denise Hearn, Long Now's Director of Strategic Initiatives.
All of our commercial and civic infrastructure is invented by us — and it can be reinvented.
Eric Ries, building on his upcoming book, Incorruptible, will talk about how founders and leaders can build incorruptible organizations that will last for decades and tangibly support human flourishing.
Today's organizational design choices will either become tomorrow's liberating structures or inherited constraints. How do we architect accountability mechanisms that outlive their creators? What governance structures remain resilient across generations of technological, economic, and cultural transformation? Ries will explore how building for incorruptibility requires imagining not just the organization we need today, but the institutions that future generations will thank us for creating.
Why This Talk Matters Now
Ries’ work arrives at a moment when leaders are searching for alternatives to systems that reward corruption, concentration, and short-term wins. We have the urgent responsibility to shape our collective future in ways that are accountable and aligned with human flourishing.
The Long View
This talk situates organizational design within the tradition of long-term thinking, asking: how do we build structures that remain legible, trustworthy, and adaptive long after the founders are gone? By exploring incorruptibility as a design principle, this conversation will propose the building blocks for enabling institutional responsibility across generations.
Learn More
- WATCH Ries’s 02020 Talk The Long-Term Stock Exchange
- READ more about organizational continuity and long-lived institutions on Ideas
- LISTEN to Ries’s podcast episode with Long Now alum Tim O’Reilly
watch
bio
Over the last two decades, Eric Ries’s ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup; The Leader’s Guide; and The Startup Way.
As a founder, he has put his own ideas into practice with The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; the Lean Startup Co, which teaches and supports the implementation of Lean Startup; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU, where the ideas that became the Lean Startup method were forged. On his podcast, The Eric Ries Show, he talks to guests including world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives working to build profitable companies for the long-term benefit of society. Eric has served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and IDEO. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children.
Eric’s new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great, is available worldwide on May 28, 02026.
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