Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Sure. Sure. I have all these in my fridge. Okay. I don't know if you saw this, but everyone's complaining of how they've gotten worse and they have all the highest level of toxins and then they're owned by BlackRock now, it turns out. No, I was just wondering about that. Oh, okay. Now that's my new favorite example. That's really fun. I didn't even know that. But yeah, it's so common. It's the point now where I was doing an interview with someone who was telling me about a certain natural foods brand and the name of the product is the name of the founder. It's like, I can't remember her name now. It's just her name. That's the name of the product. And she gets ousted by investors and he's about to tell me the story. I said, "Let me guess what happened next. The board pushed her out in pursuit of higher growth, higher margins. As a result, we've seen lower quality and customers are super pissed, employees are pissed, and now it's starting to shrink market share." And he was like, "How did you know? I thought you said you didn't know this company." This pattern is so pervasive. We don't even have a name for it. We live it every day, but we don't know what to call it. Well, I know what to call it. I know what our grandparents would've called it. They would've called this corruption. Not legal bribery or embezzlement. No. This is like you're building a bridge. And if your bridge collapses, and Lenny, I say you're an engineer and I say, "Lenny, why did my bridge collapse?" If you're like, "Well, because of gravity," I'm going to be like, "Dude, yeah, thank you for that genius insight." I understand that that is correct in some very real way. We say, "Well, it's inevitable. It's greed." I call it financial gravity. "There's this thing of human nature when companies get big, whenever..." "Yeah, but I want to know why did this bridge collapse? And more importantly, how come other bridges didn't collapse?" Then they say, "Oh, for that, we need to study the load, load factor, wind load, shearing tension." And we go look up close, we say, "Oh, look, all the metal bolts have been corroded. They're rusted. No wonder it collapsed." And then if you say, " Well, I want to build a new bridge, but I don't want this one to collapse. What can I do?" You won't say, "Well, gravity, what can you do?" No. You'll say, "Why don't we use stainless steel next time on the bolts so they don't get corroded?" "Oh yeah, good idea." So this book is about what are the organizational equivalents of stainless steel. And the book is structured, not like a traditional business book, as you say, you picked up on that. It's much more like a mystery, a double mystery. First of all, why has this been going on for hundreds of years when we all think that the market selects for value creation, so this shouldn't happen, yet it happens all the time. But secondly, if it's inevitable, if it's caused by greed or age or size, why are there exceptions?…

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