Eric Ries on "Incorruptible"

In partnership with The Ivy Tech Community College, Gayle & Bill Cook Center for Entrepreneurship and the South Central Indiana Small Business Development Center, we are proud to welcome author and entrepreneur Eric Ries for a discussion of his new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great.

This will be an in-store event that Eric Ries will join virtually, and it will be moderated by Erik Coyne, Chancellor of Ivy Tech Bloomington.

Please note: Incorruptible will be released on May 26, 2026. Copies will not be available at this event, but we are accepting preorders on our website both for in-store pickup and for shipping upon the book's release.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

From Eric Ries, creator of The Lean Startup, comes a bold and urgently needed rethink of how organizations are built—and why success itself so often turns companies against the people and principles that made them worth building in the first place.
For decades, we've explained corporate corruption as a problem of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. But that story doesn't match reality. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behavior, and mission abandonment—often despite the best intentions of the people inside them.
Incorruptible argues that this failure is not primarily ethical. It is structural.
As organizations grow, the systems that govern them—ownership, incentives, charters, accountability, and decision-making—quietly reshape behavior. When those systems are poorly designed, even principled leaders are pushed toward outcomes they never wanted. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, bending companies away from their original purpose.
Drawing on two decades of work with founders, CEOs, investors, and institution builders, Ries shows how these failures arise predictably—and how they can be prevented. He reframes corporate governance not as bureaucracy or compliance, but as a creative and strategic act at the heart of building enduring, mission-controlled companies.
At a moment when trust in business is eroding, Incorruptible offers a clear-eyed diagnosis and a practical blueprint for change.
Success alone will not protect what matters most. Only incorruptible design can.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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, Eric has put his own ideas into practice with the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU. On The Eric Ries Show, he talks with world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives building for the long-term. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children.

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