Why Corporate Corruption Is so Common

The truth is, we’re all one acquisition, one IPO, one board meeting away from watching something we love turn into something we hate. But we lack the vocabulary to call it what it really is. “Mission drift” sounds like a navigation error. “Bureaucracy” sounds like paperwork. Neither captures the gut punch of betrayal when something precious is corroded beyond recognition.

So I call it by a simple, old-fashioned name: corruption.

I’m willing to bet you’ve felt it yourself in your own life and career. Maybe it was the day your favorite company killed the product you loved. Or when your own company canceled its innovation projects to help “make the quarter.” Or when you watched helplessly as the “professional CEO” brought in to replace the founder drove the company into the ground. Or when leadership changed, and the mission became just words on a website.

Maybe you’ve wondered why everyone accepts this as inevitable. Maybe you, too, have wondered if there’s a better way.

There is.

To find it, we have to accept something that almost everyone understands intuitively yet rarely says out loud: Not every form of making money is equally good.

I’ve spent years trying to understand who is responsible for this treacherous state of affairs. Managers blame executives, executives blame the board, the board blames investors. Then you talk to the investors—and I have—and they act dismayed too. Many are horrified by all this short-termism. But they blame executive greed: the stock buybacks, the golden parachutes. Executives fire back that investors say they want sustainable, long-term returns, but they also want to be able to liquidate their position at any moment. It’s like watching two people pointing at each other, each yelling, “You did it!” while standing in a house they both set on fire.

Nobody seems to be in charge.

The force behind this—one that no one controls but everyone obeys—affects far more of your daily life than you probably realize. Everywhere at once, like gravity, it radiates far beyond the corporate boardroom, explaining phenomena as diverse as the spiraling cost of American transit construction, the gutting of local journalism, the malignancy of social media, the persistence of medical errors, and why customer service would rather put you on hold than solve your problem.

Yet look around. In almost every industry, there are outlier companies that remain purpose-driven despite massive scale: Vanguard in finance, Patagonia in apparel, Costco in retail. Once you know how to look, you’ll discover them everywhere, quietly fulfilling their promise day after day, year after year, while making huge profits.

We’ve come to accept that the gradual corruption of successful companies is as natural and inevitable as gravity. Yet if there are outliers that resist it, that story can’t be the whole truth.

So what can any individual actually do about it?

Every click, every swipe, every like, every purchase fuels their algorithms. They all boil down to the same thing: What will you do? You—the customer, the subscriber, the potential investor, the employee. Even when you think nobody is looking, every choice you make reverberates in gravitational waves.

Only you can help break this cycle. If you are not yet addicted to the products and platforms extracting value from you rather than creating it, do not begin. And if you still have the strength, walk away. As a customer, as an employee, as an investor, you have the power to refuse.

Typically, this is framed as a “collective action problem,” as if there is no point in doing the right thing unless you’ve already agreed with others to do the same. But seeing it this way causes us to miss a surprising source of power. Remember how gravity works: It emerges from perception. Every transaction sends a signal. When you walk away, that action becomes their data—and someone’s OKR. When enough people make similar choices, even without coordinating, leaders see the pattern. That’s how individual gravity becomes a collective force.

And we give this power away so cheaply, so thoughtlessly. We invest our retirement savings in the very systems we complain about. We buy from whoever has the slickest marketing or the most convenient platform. We work for companies we don’t believe in. And with each choice, we add our small bit of gravity to the system, making it feel more permanent, more inevitable.

Ursula K. Le Guin described our “inevitable” financial and economic systems thus: “Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” The structures that govern modern life are younger than the trees in your local park. Their inevitability is an illusion.

The future we build depends not on some distant “them” making better decisions but on us recognizing the power we already have.

Excerpted from Incorruptible by Eric Ries, published by Authors Equity. Copyright © 2026 by Eric Ries. Reprinted by permission of Authors Equity.