Reading up on Eric Ries

Designers face a cursed problem between wanting to improve the world and serving shareholder value, leaving them disappointed optimists who must choose what to sacrifice.

Eric Ries argues that companies succumb to 'financial gravity'—structural incentives that corrupt their mission over time—and that certain governance structures can resist this decay.

Decades of standardized startup methods like Lean Startup have failed to improve survival rates because widely shared techniques eliminate competitive differentiation, pointing to a Red Queen dynamic.