Incorruptible by Design

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Mix and mingle over drinks and small bites with other attendees at our pre & post-show gathering in the re-imagined Cowell Theater Lobby!

While the corporation, profit maximization, and financial systems feel immutable, 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.

This conversation-style Long Now Talk will be facilitated by Denise Hearn, Long Now Director of Strategic Partnerships.

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

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.

is a globally-recognized champion of long-term thinking and responsibility, operating within the context of the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now. Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience on stage in San Francisco and with millions more around the globe through our podcast and videos.

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