FranklinCovey On Leadership Eric Ries: Your Culture Is the Problem—Not Your People
9 snips
Apr 21, 2026 
Eric Ries, entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, explains why leadership and systems—not people—stifle innovation. He discusses small leader-led experiments, redesigning incentives to reward learning, the culture bank for building trust, and aligning governance with long-term purpose. Practical, contrarian ideas for making organizations adaptable and trustworthy.
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Leader Behavior Shapes Organizational Outcomes
- Leaders are often the root cause when teams consistently do the wrong thing.
- Eric Ries: if everyone who works for you behaves poorly, look in the mirror because how you hold people accountable shapes outcomes.
Million Dollar Experiment That Saved The Company
- A team given $1M to experiment ran MVPs costing $10k each and discovered the idea had no market.
- They saved $900k but were punished culturally because deviation from plan felt like failure.
Forecasting Breaks Down For New Work
- 20th‑century forecasting techniques require stable operating histories and break down for novel, uncertain work.
- When doing something new you create uncertainty; holding people to forecasts misattributes failure to execution instead of unknowns.
