Julie Einstein Stuecken — 'a founder asked me to protect the company from him on his worst day'

Julie Einstein Stuecken — Fractional CMO — recounts being asked by a serial entrepreneur to write a mission-protection document specifically to guard the company against the founder himself going rogue. She credits Incorruptible with reframing the entire exercise.

“Last week I spent some time writing a document whose entire job is to keep a company loyal to its mission long after the founders are gone. The line that stopped me came from the founder himself: "What if I lost my mind and went rogue? It should protect the company and the mission against me." I've written a lot of things for founders, and nobody has ever asked me to protect the company from them. It's the corporate version of writing your own prenup and quietly rooting for the other side. Even so, my first instinct was that this was just like any company manifesto. Write the values, state the culture, set the north star. I was wrong, and Eric Ries is the reason. Founders quietly build "a massive vault" of the "most underrated resource on the planet, trustworthiness," then leave it wide open. "There's no doors, there's no locks." Nobody guards trust, because it never shows up on a balance sheet, until the day it walks out the door. So you build the locks while the company is still small enough that nobody has bothered to come for it.” — Julie Einstein Stuecken on LinkedIn