Aidan McCullen connects Covey's clam chowder to Sol Price: 'a prophecy about capitalism itself'

Thinkers50 Award winner and Innovation Show host Aidan McCullen — an early manuscript reader — frames Incorruptible as the through-line between Stephen Covey's clam-chowder fable and Sol Price's FedMart story: a 200-year pattern of 'enlightened capitalism' founders who get butchered by the investors meant to protect them.

“Covey borrowed that image from Aesop, today we see it was a prophecy about capitalism itself. Another great book that shaped how many of us see the world is Eric Ries's The Lean Startup. It changed how a generation of founders thought about building. But what we didn't know then was what Ries was watching the Golden Geese get strangled from a front-row seat in many businesses that he helped scale. In his new book Incorruptible, Ries takes us back to 1975 and a man named Sol Price. Price built FedMart on the radical idea that a business owes its first duty to its customers, its second to its employees, and only its third to its shareholders. Price paid workers twice the going rate. He capped his own margins. He operated like a fiduciary and it worked spectacularly. Eventually, his investors sacked him at a time when FedMart was thriving. What Ries discovered is that Sol Price was not an anomaly. He was part of a pattern stretching back over 200 years, what he calls "enlightened capitalism" where founders who discover that doing right by people is the most profitable path, only to have that goose butchered by the very investors who were meant to protect it. The more golden the goose, Ries writes, the stronger the temptation to butcher it.” — Aidan McCullen on LinkedIn