The Podcast

Aaron Anderson has spent the last 20 years in construction: framing houses, studying economics, reading the Bitcoin white paper, and eventually becoming the Innovation Director at Swinerton, one of the largest general contractors in the country. That path sounds unlikely. It's also exactly what makes him worth listening to.

Construction is a useful lens for understanding innovation inside large organizations because it makes the problems impossible to hide. Every project is its own budget. Overhead is a dirty word. Innovation has to prove itself on a timeline that was never designed to support it. If an idea doesn't work on this job, nobody's funding it on the next one.

I've spent a lot of time on this show arguing that large companies aren't built to take risks. Aaron lives that contradiction every day, and he has some of the clearest thinking I've come across on how to actually move the needle anyway. His definition of innovation alone, managing the inertia of incumbent industries, is worth the price of admission.

Here’s a teaser…

Find Aaron on Linkedin and get a copy of Incorruptible at the link below.

What You Missed on Sunday

Here’s what we covered in Sunday’s newsletter edition…

Quick question before this week's article: who does your company actually work for?

Not who you serve. Not who's named in the mission statement. Who you're structurally bound to put first. Most founders have never answered that question, because the standard incorporation stack answered it for them before they thought to ask.

This week, I'm looking at what happened when the most famous attempt to escape that default got unwound in public, and at the companies that built escape hatches that actually held: Vanguard, Bosch, Rolex, and a grocery chain whose CEO needed $1.5 billion to buy back his own mission.

Here’s what you’ll find: