You aren’t going to live forever, but the company you’ve founded might.   And the chances are you’d like it to carry on pretty much as you envisaged it.

As Brian Chesky puts it in another gem from Eric Ries’s Out of The Crisis podcast:

“Design your company so that the wrong person running your company doesn’t ruin your company.”

One way of minimising the risk of this happening is to build it so that it makes and keeps it’s unique Promise of Value purposely, consistently yet creatively, so that even in the wrong hands, it can’t help but deliver the Promise you meant it to.

Another way is to have everyone in the company running it.

The best way is to combine the two.

It’s hard to hijack everyone.

Especially when everyone shares the same purpose.