I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff at a structural level, mostly due to an intense if idle curiosity about it. I don't claim to have all the answer

I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff at a structural level, mostly due to an intense if idle curiosity about it. I don't claim to have all the answers (or the right ones) but I have some ideas. They stem from the perspective that this is fundamentally a question of how you design an organization that can endure for 100 years, and the observation that "business" problems tend to (perhaps only) kill companies which are not structured to anticipate them and deal with them when they arise. Here are some things I would consider absolutely essential: 1) A fundamentally simple governance structure. It could ultimately be huge or many-layered or whatever in practice but it has to be structurally simple enough that you can reason about how it is intended to handle any given thing. The worst kinds of cracks are liable to form if it encounters something unknown and has no mechanism either for handling it or deciding how to handle it. 2) The governance framework must be backed by a living document codifying policies which a) Are affirmative; b) Are as unambiguous as possible; c) Theoretically conflict with each other as little as possible; d) Include mechanisms for adjudicating policy conflicts; and e) Articulate their rationale. The company has to be willing to shut down rather than violate the most important of these policies. I like to call this approach "values nationalism." 3) The organization must evolve its formal policies as it makes decisions. Otherwise you're going to end up with common law. Reasonable minds can disagree about whether common law is a good idea in government but I'll venture to say it's always a bad idea in business. 4) The organization must be vigilant about predicting, monitoring, and mitigating internal threats to its integrity which arise out of perverse incentive structures. It must be willing to sacrifice short term money in order to eliminate perverse incentives. 5) The organization must have mechanisms in place which allow it radically reorganize itself in response to external threats (recession, regulatory capture, takeovers, etc.). I may have left one or more important things out. But the vast majority of individual "business" issues are going to fall under one of these categories.