Mission corruption isn't a moral failure. It's an engineering failure.

Shankar founded and runs Troo in India. Her Goodreads review reads the book's case studies as proofs: Sol Price ousted from FedMart by his own board, Patagonia making the earth its majority shareholder, GitLab's values embedded deep enough to decide things with nobody in the room. She rates the chapters on mission transmission and the culture bank the most usable, and calls the book essential for founders who feel pride and fear about scale.

“The central argument is both simple and devastating: mission corruption isn't a moral failure. It's an engineering failure. "Financial gravity" - the doctrine of shareholder primacy is a force so deeply embedded in corporate law, investor expectations, and boardroom norms that it bends even the most principled founders toward extraction, often without anyone noticing until it's too late.” — Sudha Shankar on Goodreads