A few weeks ago I sat in an audience at an angel conference and listened to Eric Ries speak.
If you don't know the name, Ries wrote The Lean Startup, one of the most influential business books of the last twenty years. I've been following his work since before that book existed. Back in 2008 I took an advanced entrepreneurship course co-taught by Steve Blank, whose book The Four Steps to the Epiphany was the spark that eventually became The Lean Startup. So I've been in this intellectual family a long time. I know this man's voice.
Which is why what I heard at that conference stopped me.
You could hear pain in his voice. Anger, even. At venture capital. At the machine. And maybe a little at himself, for helping build a framework that made it incredibly easy to light fires without any real governance to keep the fire where it belongs. A fire in the fireplace warms the house. The same fire loose in the hills burns down the forest. His new book, Incorruptible, is his answer to that problem. It asks why good companies go bad, and how great ones stay great.
I want to tell you why this business book read to me like a book about God.
The Word I Didn't Expect
Near the end of his talk, Ries got to the core value that he believes is worth building a company around.
Love.
Not innovation. Not excellence. Not customer obsession or any of the other words I've cycled through over the years on values slides I mostly made up. Love. Love the customer. Love your employees. Love the people who make the whole thing go. He pointed to companies that had genuinely leaned into it and stayed great because of it.
And I sat there thinking, you're exactly right. I just don't think you know how right you are.
Because Scripture says something stronger than "love is a good core value." It says "God is love" (1 John 4:8). Not God values love. Not God recommends love. God is love. So when a man builds an entire framework around love as the immutable center, the thing that can never be compromised no matter what it costs, he is describing God whether he knows it or not. I think Ries is being topical (not a criticism) about something that is actually spiritual. The whole book is a spiritual framework wearing a business suit (a compliment).
Drift Never Announces Itself
Here's the heart of the book, and the reason I couldn't put it down.
Ries argues that corruption is almost never a story about bad people. Companies founded with real ideals drift into short-term thinking and mission abandonment despite the good intentions of nearly everyone inside them. Nobody wakes up and decides to betray the mission. There's just a small concession that seems reasonable. Then another. Then another. Each one defensible in isolation. And the compounding is the killer, because one day you look up and you've lost your way, and you can't point to the day it happened.
Now read that paragraph again, but make it about faith.
Nobody wakes up and says, I'm walking away from God today. You just don't pray this morning. You solve today's problem without Him because you've got this one. The Word gets a little less central. Ego gets a little louder. Success starts validating your decisions, which is the most dangerous part, because drift doesn't usually strike in the hard times. It strikes when you're comfortable, when everything is working, when you feel least like you need an anchor.
The Bible called this thousands of years ago, nautical metaphor and all: "We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away" (Hebrews 2:1). A boat doesn't need an engine to leave the harbor. It just needs an untied rope.
Spiritual drift and business drift aren't similar. They're the same phenomenon. Small compromises, compounding quietly, in the absence of a center.
The Binding Covenant
So what's the fix? Ries's answer is what he calls a binding covenant. Not a mission statement, because every company has one of those hanging on a wall that nobody reads. A covenant is different. It's written early, before the pressure arrives. Everyone buys in. Employees, partners, investors, everyone signs on. And it cannot be overridden by revenue, growth, ego, fame, or fear.
Other professions figured this out long ago. Medicine has "first, do no harm." Finance has fiduciary duty, the obligation to act in the other person's interest even when exploiting them would pay better. Soldiers swear an oath to the Constitution, deliberately a principle and not a person. In every case, the covenant exists precisely for the moments when violating it would be profitable and convenient.
I have a binding covenant too. Mine is with God. But will have one in business too!
And here's the thing I find most beautiful about it. It's the only perfect thing I have. My marriage is wonderful and flawed, because I'm in it. My business, my friendships, my body, my plans, all flawed, because I'm in all of them. But the covenant itself, the center I get to come back to, is perfect. I always know where home is. That's what a center gives you. Not a guarantee you'll never wander, but a fixed point that tells you the truth about where you are.
Fight From the Center
At some point in all this I asked myself a hard question. What am I willing to sacrifice to protect the center?
And the answer that came back surprised me, because it reframed the whole question. Everything. Every single thing else can go, one hundred percent of it, because everything else is only possible because of the center. Money can go. Growth can go. An investor can go. A customer can go. The business itself can go. If you preserve all of it by giving up the center, you've preserved nothing worth having.
But "protect the center" is actually the wrong picture, and this is the part I keep chewing on.
God doesn't need my protection. I don't stand in front of Him with a sword. I stand behind Him. You don't defend the center. You fight from it. It's the stronghold, not the treasure. With God, not in front of God. Let Him determine the direction of the battle.
Business works the same way. When the hard decision comes, you don't move the covenant to accommodate reality. You make reality compete with the covenant.
And I'll say one more thing, carefully, about all of us, me included. A lot of money gets made in this world in ways that are going to raise some questions someday. I don't know what God is going to ask anybody on that day. I'm not smart enough to know. But I think there will be questions. The center is the only answer I want to be holding when they come.
The Dollar Fifty Sermon
Ries tells a story in the book that I loved for an extra reason, because it starts in my backyard.
Costco's roots trace back to San Diego. Sol Price built Price Club here in the 1970s, and the whole warehouse club model that Costco perfected was born right up the road from where I live. Jim Sinegal, Costco's co-founder, learned the business working for Sol. So this isn't some abstract case study to me. This is hometown history.
The Story of a Hotdog
Costco has sold the hot dog and soda combo for a dollar fifty since the mid 1980s. Forty years. Think about what else was a buck and change back then. The burgers at the drive-thru that cost about the same now run six or seven dollars. Everything got repriced. The hot dog didn't.
Now here's what makes that a covenant story and not a pricing story. Every single year, somebody inside a company like that can build the deck. Raise the combo a dollar, multiply by a hundred million hot dogs, and watch tens of millions of dollars drop straight to the bottom line. Margin jumps. Revenue jumps. The stock gets a bump. And the person making that pitch isn't a villain. By the short-term math, they're right.
That is exactly how drift arrives, remember. Not as betrayal. As a reasonable concession, professionally presented.
Which is why my favorite detail is how Costco's leadership has responded to that pitch. Sinegal reportedly told his successor that if he ever raised the price of the hot dog, he'd kill him. That's not a pricing strategy. That's covenant language. That's a man saying this item is not for sale, because it isn't really an item.
Because the hot dog isn't food. It's the covenant made visible. It's proof, sitting right there at the food court, that the center is not for sale. Millions of members have grown to trust that thing, and the trust is the actual product. Raise the price and you'd gain margin for a quarter and quietly announce that everything else is negotiable too. Trust erodes in silence, and you cannot buy it back at any price.
Better in the Long-Run
And notice something important for the shareholder-first crowd: honoring the covenant is the best long-term return. Costco's shareholders have done just fine. Doing good and doing well converge on the long horizon. They only diverge when you shorten the clock. Which means short-term thinking isn't just a strategy problem. It's the mechanism of drift itself. Drift is what happens when you shorten the clock.
So now I'm walking around asking myself the obvious question, and I'll ask you too. What's your dollar fifty hot dog? What's the visible, almost irrational commitment in your business, your family, your walk, that proves your center is not for sale? If you can't name one, that might be the first thing the covenant needs.
You Feel It Before You See It
Here's something useful I've noticed about drift, in both arenas. It has an early warning system.
Long before drift becomes visible as corruption, it shows up as a feeling of misalignment. Spiritually, it's restlessness. A little more anger than the situation deserves. Prayer that feels thin. A distance you can't articulate yet but can absolutely feel. In business, it's the customer who pencils out great but something doesn't sit right. The opportunity that checks every box, and yet you notice you're having to convince yourself.
The dangerous moment is right there. It's when you feel that resistance and rationalize through it instead of investigating it.
This is what the covenant is actually for. It gives you language for something you can only feel. Instead of talking yourself past the discomfort, you go back to the center and ask the immutable questions. Does this honor God? Is this love? Is this genuinely in this person's best interest? Why exactly does this feel off? The feeling was the smoke alarm. The covenant tells you where the fire is.
The Only Fix I Know
So how do you catch drift before it works its way in?
I can only tell you what I've learned on the spiritual side, and it took me embarrassingly long to learn it. I used to think the deal was transactional. Pray in the morning, read the Bible, and God will be with me. Box checked. And you know, He probably will be. But what I didn't understand for most of my life is that He isn't after my checkbox. He's craving a relationship.
And a relationship is always on.
It's never neglected, never parked until Sunday. I'm thinking about Him as I write this sentence, hoping He's writing it with me. I spoke Him into my run this morning. I breathe Him in and out during the day. Every time I think about Him, I pour in. That constant connection is the whole anti-drift system, because when the relationship is always on, distance gets noticed fast. You can't drift far from someone you talk to all day.
And when I do lose the thread, because I still do, I know exactly what to do, because David showed us from the cave. Cry out. Talk it out, loud, honest, unfiltered. For me, once I finally stop and turn around, recentering sometimes takes no more than an hour. That's the gift of knowing where home is.
The Sign on the Door
Here's my confession: when I started writing this post, I hadn't finished the book. I wondered if the spiritual weight of it all was some kind of happy accident, a business thinker stumbling onto sacred ground without noticing.
Having finished it, I no longer believe that.
I don't think any of this is accident. I think it's divine intervention. You can speak God out of the spirituality all you want, hang whatever disclaimers you like on the door, and He's still there. He's the reason the framework works. Love is the reason it works, and God is love. You cannot build something true around love and keep its Author out of the building.
Because look at what this book actually teaches, stripped to its bones. You have a center. You will wander from it, not through one great betrayal but through a thousand small, reasonable concessions. And the way back is to turn around and return to the center (or have a framework that prevents the concessions), which has been holding steady the whole time, waiting for you.
That's not a business framework. That's the story of King David. Honestly, it's the story of the entire Old Testament. Israel drifts, forgets, chases other things, hits the wall, cries out, and comes home. Over and over, for a thousand pages. And every single time, God is right where they left Him. The center never moves. That's the whole point of a center. When you need to find your way home, you don't need a map. You just need to turn around. He'll be there.
Applications for Business
The book's answer and my answer turned out to be the same answer. You prepare for spiritual drift in its business form, and you prepare before it arrives. It will not come as a villain. It will come as small concessions, each one defensible, each one presented professionally, accumulating quietly over years until one day you look around and say the saddest sentence a founder can say: this isn't the business I started.
The defense is everything this post has been circling. Know your center. Write the covenant now, while you're small and it costs nothing, because the company that needs the document can no longer write it honestly. Build it to survive you. Keep a hot dog, something visibly not for sale. Trust the feeling of misalignment before you can articulate it. And keep the relationship with the center always on, because you can't drift far from something you return to every day.
I'll leave you with this. Eric Ries picked the right word. Out of every value a company could build on, he chose the one that Scripture says is not just an attribute of God but the very essence of Him. My prayer, genuinely, is that anyone who builds their life or their company around love keeps walking toward the center of it. Because if you follow love far enough in, you don't find a value.
You find God.
He's more right than he knows. I suspect that one day he’ll find out HOW right.