Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 295. Culture Club: Communicating Values That Scale

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

Why the best leaders treat uncertainty as a chance to learn, not a failure to avoid.Most companies are built to grow. Far fewer are built to stay true to their purpose as they do.Eric Ries is an entrepreneur, creator of the Lean Startup movement, and author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. For Ries, innovation starts with a simple reality: nobody can predict the future. “If you're going to do something fundamentally new,” he says, “how are we supposed to forecast” what success will look like? Instead of relying on certainty, leaders should focus on learning. “If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Ries and host Matt Abrahams explore how leaders can communicate through uncertainty, turn setbacks into valuable insights, and build cultures rooted in trust. From the power of the build-measure-learn feedback loop to the importance of making “deposits” in a company’s culture bank, Ries shares practical strategies for creating organizations that innovate, adapt, and stay true to their values as they grow.To listen to the extended Deep Thinks version of this episode, please visit FasterSmarter.io/premium.Episode Reference Links:Eric RiesEric’s Book: IncorruptibleEp.56 Lean Messaging: How Simple Messages Really StickEp.54 Leadership and Ethics: How to Communicate Your Core Values  Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedIn Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction (02:15) - Lean Startup Fundamentals (03:57) - Business Plans vs. Reality (06:25) - Learning from Failure (08:05) - Why Companies Go Bad (10:43) - The Culture Bank (13:45) - The Final Three Questions (21:11) - Conclusion ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smart

Hi, Matt here. Ever struggle at a networking event? Well, then our June newsletter is just for you. You can learn best practices for better networking and about all the exciting things we're doing. Check out our June newsletter. Available now on LinkedIn and on FasterSmartre.0 under resources, now a word from our sponsors. Their support covers the cost of production, allowing us to bring you this episode free of charge. Strawberry.me makes coaching more accessible, affordable, and global, connecting you with a coach who's the right fit for you. I've had the privilege of working with some truly great coaches. And I've also spent many years coaching others. And I can tell you firsthand, coaching makes a real difference. The challenge is that coaching has often felt out of reach for a lot of people. It can be expensive, difficult to access, or something people assume is only for senior executives.

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Communication, creativity, and trust. My name's Matt Abrams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with Eric Reese. Eric is an entrepreneur and the creator of the lean startup methodology, a global movement that has fundamentally transformed how businesses approach innovation and product development. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup, The Startup Way,

and his new book is incorruptible, why good companies go bad and great companies stay great. Well, welcome, Eric. I am excited to chat with you. Thanks for being here. I am delighted. Shall we get started? Let's do it. Before we get to your more recent area of focus,

I'd like to discuss some of the core concepts your lean methodology advocates for, especially around communication. Can you provide us with an overview of lean and the minimally viable approach and where communication fits into it? Sure. Okay, so just real quick to back up, I'm a tech entrepreneur from way back when,

and I wrote this book called Lean Startup in 2011 that kind of changed my life. Like at its root, most people who are trying to do something new, whether they call themselves an entrepreneur or not, have this fundamental problem, which is like, how do I communicate progress when I'm in a condition of extreme uncertainty. And if you're going to do something fundamentally new,

how are we supposed to forecast, how many you're supposed to have made? Like, it's actually a huge problem that we don't think about very often because conventional management systems are all based on this 20th century idea of extrapolating from a stable operating history to produce an accurate forecast.

So Lean Startup at its heart is to take the business plan, the fiction writing part of entrepreneurship, or of any kind of business enterprise, and extract from it the hypotheses, the leap of faith assumptions that have to be true for the business to be a good idea. And then instead of just pretending like we know those are true, we try to test them using scientific methods to create what we call validated learning, using a structured experimental approach we call the minimum viable product or MVP. And the most critical concept is that if we discover that some element of the plan is not working, it's not correct, then we execute a pivot. Sorry, that's probably our most overused bit of business jargon. The only startup has contributed to the world, but we invented that term.

The pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision. I really appreciate you distilling it down. I want to break down just a couple pieces of that. And I'd love as part of this for you to talk about the whole build, measure, learn loop that you talk about. You said something that might have caused some of our listeners and viewers to pause. You talked about a business plan is fiction writing. Can you break that down for us and then talk a little bit more about the build, measure, learn loop? This is something that in our normal lives, we understand this concept perfectly fine.

And then for some reason, in business, we are trained to forget it. So I just want you to imagine, if you start telling random people you meet on the street, I know what is going to happen in the future. They will look at you very strange. But in business, for some reason, we're supposed to pretend that we can predict the future when obviously we can't. So the plan is not a problem. It's not a problem to imagine what the future might be.

If something's going wrong, you assume it's because of one of the things on your plan that you haven't done. And this is a good assumption to make if your plan is 100% correct. But if you acknowledge that you can't predict the future, how do you know that you're picking the right thing to do for an entrepreneur? And to me, I conceived of entrepreneurship like an idea factory. We don't ship physical objects. We are actually trying to maximize our own learning, our own understanding of the business. because it's from that understanding that business models and other business outcomes can flow. That's the one thing that general managers in an existing business have that we don't have.

They actually know what their supply chain looks like. They know who their customer is. They know that they have all this history. We don't have it. We have to manufacture that history. So I called it the build, measure, learn, feedback loop. How much time elapses between when we have an idea about what we think customers want, what we think is going to work.

And when we have validated, we have data that shows that that idea is correct. or incorrect. And we were talking about the communication side of it. The thing I found the most difficult as an entrepreneur is how do I explain to people how they should prioritize. I had the vision. I have this grand idea. So, you know, I can make stuff up no problem. But a company is defined not just by what the leader decides, but the thousands upon thousands of micro decisions that people have to make left and right. And unlike in a traditional business, in a startup, you're building new process all the time, confronting problems for the first time. Well, you're building. measure to learn gives us a concrete, easy to explain, easy to evaluate answer. Whatever the thing is,

if it optimizes our speed through this loop, then we do that version. Otherwise, we don't do it. Having some kind of heuristic framework can be really, really helpful. And I appreciate you sharing that. And seeing entrepreneurship is idea generation, I think is really a novel way and really helps people understand the value that entrepreneurship brings. To be an entrepreneur, an idea generator, requires a healthy relationship with failure and negative feedback. How do you advise leaders to communicate their setbacks and to deal with the negativity that comes from those things? This is a major communication error I see in leaders actually of all size companies, but especially of entrepreneurs. If you say that if something unexpected happens, that's a failure, you have literally created the preconditions for no learning to take place.

because the oldest lesson of the scientific method is that if you cannot fail, you cannot learn. So instead of conceiving of an unexpected result as a failure, we need to see it the way a scientist would and understanding that learning is not a failure is a huge problem, especially in big companies where we preach the say-do ratio so religiously that we assume that anytime something unexpected happens, it must be because of incompetent planning or incompetent execution for getting a third possibility, which is that the situation itself is too uncertain to forecast. And all of these lean startup techniques are not about celebrating failure. I actually don't like some people to call it an embrace failure or celebrate failure philosophy. I don't accept that. I actually don't think that's right.

That's not the issue. The issue is how do we define success and failure? And to me, if we learn what is necessary, we did it in an efficient way, in a way that was humane and scientific, that actually is a success. And it is a necessary step on our journey to building a breakthrough product. So it really comes down to reframing what is a failure. And a failure if you learn from it and you do it quickly and make adjustments is in fact a success. And that's critical for us to understand, but also for leaders to communicate that expectation. I'd like now to switch to your new book, Incorruptible. Can you share the central thesis and why you think it's so important at this particular time.

The lean startup movement, the startup movement more broadly, I'm incredibly proud of what we've accomplished. I'm incredibly proud of my role in it. But I've also seen the dark underbelly of this thing. And as I tell in the book, it really came home to me one day when I was talking to two different entrepreneurs

on the same day, one of whom was just beginning his entrepreneurial journey and one of whom was completing it in a way. And the new entrepreneur, I call the professor in the book, to protect his privacy. He was really confused because he was trying to create this breakthrough new technology.

And his investors were like very amoral about it. He's actually trying to recruit like senior researchers. They have really tough questions. They're asking him, okay, how do we know you're only going to use this technology the way we intend? He's like, well, I promise. Oh, yeah? What if they fire you? And he's like, what am I supposed to say that?

Meanwhile, I'm going to this event where we are commemorating a founder who had left his company, but not volunteer him. He had built billions of dollars of shareholder value, and yet his investors wanted more, and they had pushed him out. Despite doing everything right, the way we teach entrepreneurs today, that success will make them strong. Success will give them power and therefore freedom. We forget to mention that the more successful your organization, the more valuable it

is as a target for someone to steal from you. We take over a company, we betray its promises, we extract value from it. Ironically, the most trustworthy companies are the most valuable to do that with. Our grandparents would have called this corruption. And so I think we should bring that word back, expand its definition once again to involve any kind of economic activity that makes money without creating value. Anyway, I shared all this with the professor. He asked me the question that launched this whole book, is it possible to build an incorruptible

company? And I was like, well, good news, bad news. The good news is, yes, I do believe it is possible. There are these outlier companies that have been architected with the source. strength to resist this corruption. But the bad news is, since you've been following all the best practices we teach entrepreneurs about how to build, structure, and govern companies, you are not on track to accomplish this incorruptible outcome. And we, in fact, did put his company on a new and better path. But I want to just do that for one company. I want to do it for every company going

forward. Very powerful mission, very important mission. So you talk about several really intriguing ideas. One that I really liked was this notion of a culture bank. Tell us about it and tell us how communication plays out. It's super cool because it's an idea that's very easy to explain and very hard to do. And everyone who I teach it to the first time, they always react the same way and they tell me that it's impossible. But I learned the technique from people who had built like high integrity, high culture companies, strong culture companies is what I mean. And it's actually really simple. The problem with communicating about trustworthiness is that trustworthy actions, right actions, always score as ROI negative, almost by definition, because the benefit is intangible,

but the costs are tangible. So what we need to do is we need to give employees a way to think about, to reason about the value of the trustworthiness asset. And in order to do that, we need to think about it like an asset, like a thing you put in a bank account. The culture bank idea is this. whenever an employee makes a sacrifice on behalf of a customer or a employee or any other stakeholder, they do a right action that comes with a cost.

That is a deposit in the culture bank. You've created an asset. When you tell a story about that, you're helping educate everyone in your company that this is the way we do things. This is what we reward. This is what we're really about. And, of course, when you do the reverse action, that's a withdrawal. The great leaders, the mission-driven leaders that I really admire, they have this ethos I call harder

is easier. They have these principles that they're really committed to. People who are acting with integrity, they recognize that because they have these principles, every plan, everything they do is going to have extra difficulty that it wouldn't have otherwise had. But instead of shying away from this, as a lot of leaders do, they learn to love it because it gives them a teaching opportunity. Every time they stop and say, sorry, it's not good enough. Sorry, we have to do it right. Sorry, we have to do this, it gives them an opportunity to communicate a cultural value and make an extra deposit in the culture bank. It turns these ideas from best they make life harder in the short term, but in the long run, they make everything else easier. So the rule I learned from Todd Park,

the rule is as a leader, only make deposits, never make withdrawals from the culture bank. It sounds like an impossible standard, but actually, it's not that hard. The great Clay Christensen once said that it is much harder to do the right thing 100% of the time than 98% of the time. So in real life, it's much more valuable to have decision heuristics that you can communicate. That just says, look, when a customer calls into the hotline and they have a problem, and we have the power to solve that problem, we don't need to do an ROI calculation. We don't need to check the fine print of the policy to see if there's some way we can get out of paying the claim. Let's just solve the problem. Let's just trust that if we always do

that in the long run, it will be beneficial to us. The focus, the intense focus on what the most precious asset is, and that is the trust and relationship that the companies have is critical. I don't know if you've set out to write a communication book, but you absolutely did. In everything we're talking about, I mean, communication, trust, empathy, demonstration, all of it, alignment. These are all communication topics. And I really appreciate how you've illuminated them. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge.

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To learn more about EvenG2, go to Evenrealities.com. And for our listeners, use promo code Think Fast at Evenrealities.com to get 10% off EvenRing one and or the even ring clip when you add them to your even ring G2 order. I'd like to end the way we end every one of our episodes where I ask three questions. One, I'm going to make up just for you and two, I've been asking everybody across all these episodes. Are you up for that? I'm up for it.

That sounds good. Excellent. In what you're doing now and what you did with Lean Startup, you were having to be a, in some cases, a singular voice advocating for things that at least the current environment wasn't listening to or looking for. Do you rely on certain strategies to help get your point across and at least get people to listen to you? It doesn't mean they have to agree with you. But what's your approach when you are the sole person advocating for something that's really important? By far, the hardest part is the inner part of it. Human beings are hardwired for a memetic desire, meaning to fit in and to be

part of the crowd. So when you're communicating something that is outside the Overton window of what seen as acceptable. It is very lonely and difficult. And I can still remember very vividly when people would yell at me about lean startup. It was seen as like really outlandish and impossible. So I must be lying. But I remember because before I was a public advocate for these ideas, I advocated for them privately. Like I was just a person in a job and people would ask me, how do you think we should get a certain thing done? And I would tell them and they would be like, that doesn't make sense. That's not the best practice. The key to this is to really meet people where they are while still telling them the truth. Very difficult to do, of course.

So what we have to do is we have to find a point of human connection between their ideas and my ideas. What are we trying to do in common? That can be a point of departure for us to go on the journey together. And then the other thing that was really important about that is you try to figure out how far on the journey are they willing to go with you. They may not be ready for everything, but can we make some progress? And we treat their morale, the most vital resource is the willingness to keep going. So it's like how do we cultivate our sense of cohesion and morale and our desire to keep going? We see that as a resource and then we try to go bit by bit. I really appreciate you sharing that. This idea that you really have to connect

to your audience and not really understand them and then take it one step further and say, how far are they willing to go today? Doesn't mean that's where they're going to end up, but how far are they willing to go today? Really important. So second question, who is is a communicator you admire and why? I already mentioned Todd Park, but there was a time when he had left, he's a healthcare entrepreneur. He's done multiple, very successful healthcare startups. But he also spent a stint in government service. He was one of those people called by the Obama administration to come out of the private sector and help make government more efficient. He served as the chief technology officer of the Department of Health and Human Services. I remember once inviting him to speak at an

entrepreneurship conference. And he got up on stage and he just started spinning this tale of the patriotic feeling that he had about serving his country in this way and the need for people of goodwill to come together to be of service and to revitalize this new generation of what the government could. And it was just it was utterly spellbinding. And he spoke for like 45 minutes or an hour. It was just like blew right past his time. Not a single person complained. Everyone in the audience was absolutely wrapped. But what I admired about it was it was, first of all, very authentic to him. It wasn't grandiose. It was very personal, very humble. And he connected with the audience. He was speaking to them as entrepreneurs, as a fellow entrepreneur, but inviting them to

imagine this other side of entrepreneurship that they would never have thought of. And that's why we wanted him to be there. So yeah, I've always admired him as a communicator. I like that he was able to really connect. In the story you told, he's able to connect and set a vision for people that people can really see. And given your history of being somebody out there early in some of these ideas, I can see why you would be drawn to him. Our final question, Eric, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? You have to give the communication the care that it deserves. So the truth is definitely the first thing and most important thing. And I think entrepreneurship especially, but all forms of

leadership. It is a truth-seeking profession at the end of the day because we can't do anything if we're out of alignment with what reality makes possible. But this second thing I was talking about is this idea of quality or craft. I was talking about Yvonne Shinar, the absolutist about quality. He used to say that quality was an objective function, which everyone thought was so crazy. Every product has a quality that it deserves. It's not in the eye of the beholder. It's absolute. I don't know if that's true for every product, but it's definitely true in communication. If you're communicating something that is precious to you, then it deserves a certain level of craft and attention. And the third thing is certainly authenticity.

That is every communication is actually very personal, whether you pretend it isn't or not. And I feel like the way we teach writing, especially because we consume so much journalism and journalism is obsessed with the view from nowhere, where we're creating like a faux objectivity, is just so fake. It's so hard to believe anybody who's trying to present themselves as objective. It's so much better to root yourself in your actual experience. And even if you're trying to be objective, to say so, this is my bias that I'm worried about and this is how I've correct, like to actually give people transparency into the process by which the communication was made. I think that's an essential part.

Those would be my top ingredients. Truth, quality, and authenticity. Certainly demonstrated in the work you've done and clearly beneficial to all of us to think about. Eric, it has been a true pleasure to talk to you about both. both of the really important concepts that you have written about and you've dedicated your life to. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. Thank you very much.

Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about lean development and communication, please listen to episode 56 with Steve Blank. To learn more about ethics, check out episode 54 as well. This episode was produced by Catherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abraham's. Our music is from Floyd Wonder with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

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