“Be Honest, Trust your team, and never please your boss” new mantra
Trust your team, be radically honest and never, ever try to please your boss. These are the ground rules if you work at Netflix. These trade secrets have revolutionised the entertainment and tech industries, and this was part of a unique cultural experiment that explains how the company has transformed itself at lighting speed from a DVD mail order service into a streaming superpower with 190 million fervent subscribers and a market capitalisation like Disney.
From unlimited holidays to abolishing approvals, Netflix offers a fundamentally different way to run any organisation, one far more in tune with an ever-changing fast-paced world.
“Family represents belonging, comfort and commitment to helping one another over the long term” explains the metaphor of corporate communities by Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix and Erin Meyer, an academic , INSEAD business school professor and expert on business culture in their new book No Rules Rules.
The leaders have strengthened their emphasis on such values since the pandemic disrupted the office based community, forcing most of the workers into uncertain homeworking exile with worries about future health and careers.
Hastings and Meyer makes it clear that family is a faulty model for ambitious growth hungry businesses such as video-streaming and media group.
Hastings explains “working to create strong feelings and commitment , cohesion and camaraderie, while continually making tough decisions to ensure the best player is manning each post. We are team not a family” is the central to the image of Netflix that emerges from the book a team of highly skilled , motivated hard edged professionals whom Hastings and his lieutenants trust to perform well within a radical no-rules corporate culture and if that performance starts to flag, they know they will be dropped. The way Netflix works has fascinated the Silicon Valley since Hastings released its 125-slide internal “culture deck” on internet 11 years ago.
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook described it as possibly “the most important document ever to come out of the Silicon Valley”.
Hastings does acknowledge failures and mis-steps as he presents earlier venture , pure software, as though it was clumsy anti-Netflix – rules bound , hierarchical and secretive, although Pure’s annual revenue doubled four years in a row and it was sold for $750m providing Hastings with the seed-funding for Netflix.
Hsstings also demonstrates his humiliating attempt to phase out Netflix’s DVD-by-mail-service. By creating Qwikster in 2011, as he turns the debacle into an epiphany, which prompted the group to start soliciting dissent from staff who had previously been afraid to contradict the founder.
More than 100 pages of principles were required to establish a culture-based freedom. Those principles as the Qwikster fiasco demonstrated need constant polishing and Tweaking while freedom is available to only those who also demonstrate responsibility.
No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, Penguin Press $28 Virgin Books £20, 320 pages.