Eric Ries

One of my favorite examples is Costco.

Okay, everyone knows Costco.

And yet most people don't understand the magic of how Costco is made.

So Costco is one of these companies, I call them the exceptions that prove the rule.

So like I was watching a video the other day

Some economist, I think, was talking about how only family-run businesses can truly maintain brand integrity over generations because if you want to have a brand promise that endures for more than 10 years, you have to resist all the temptation of the ROI stuff and the spreadsheets and the quarterly targets and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

He's listing off the companies, Ford, Toyota, Mars.

There's some family-run companies.

And then at the end of the video, he's like, oh, and also Costco for some reason.

They're not family run at all, but they're actually able to do this like kind of by magic.

Like we treat it like this magic trick and yet Costco is not alone.

you know, anyone listening, you have a Vanguard mutual fund, you ever bought a Patagonia fleece, you ever drank Carlsberg beer, taken Ozempic, you know, if you ever root for the Green Bay Packers, if you've ever watched Wallace and Gromit, like there's all these companies, practically in every industry, there's one that has some kind of unusual long-term commitment to some higher value than just making money for itself.

And if you study those exceptions,

Not a single one of them follows what I would call today's best practices for corporate governance.

So when people say that this is impossible, then you're like, okay, but if it's impossible, how come we have these exceptions?

They'll be like, well, those exceptions are idiosyncratic.

But then you're like, but then how come they all follow this pattern?

Like, then you say, well, it's probably a coincidence.

But then I'll be like, oh, no, actually, this pattern is old enough and we have enough examples that there's extensive academic evidence that this is a better way.

Yeah, so I don't want to be simplistic about it because, of course, this whole book is my attempt to put down the blueprint of how this works.