481. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by: Deidre Farrell
Author: Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
Genre: Nonfiction, Business
464 pages, published September 8, 2020
Reading Format: Book
Summary
In No Rules Rules, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and business writer Erin Meyer explore the unique culture behind one of the world’s most innovative and successful companies. Launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, Netflix has reinvented itself multiple times. Along the way, the company adopted several counterintuitive, radical management principles. Hastings built a corporate culture focused on freedom, responsibility and innovation. At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies, pay is overmarket with no bonuses, adequate performance gets a generous severance, hard work is irrelevant, you don’t try to please your boss, but give candid feedback instead.
Quotes
“The Fearless Organization, she explains that if you want to encourage innovation, you should develop an environment where people feel safe to dream, speak up, and take risks. The safer the atmosphere, the more innovation you will have.”
“A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively. What’s more, none of the other principles can work unless you have ensured this first dot is in place.”
“even when other team members were exceptionally talented and intelligent, one individual’s bad behavior brought down the effectiveness of the entire team. In dozens of trials, conducted over month-long periods, groups with one underperformer did worse than other teams by a whopping 30 to 40 percent.”
“it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.”
“A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively.”
“Humility is important in a leader and role model. When you succeed, speak about it softly or let others mention it for you. But when you make a mistake say it clearly and loudly, so that everyone can learn and profit from your errors. In other words, “Whisper wins and shout mistakes.”
“If you have a team of five stunning employees and two adequate ones, the adequate ones will sap managers’ energy, so they have less time for the top performers, reduce the quality of group discussions, lowering the team’s overall IQ, force others to develop ways to work around them, reducing efficiency, drive staff who seek excellence to quit, and show the team you accept mediocrity, thus multiplying the problem.”
“TALENT DENSITY: TALENTED PEOPLE MAKE ONE ANOTHER MORE EFFECTIVE”
“I recommend instead focusing first on something much more difficult: getting employees to give candid feedback to the boss. This can be accompanied by boss-to-employee feedback. But it’s when employees begin providing truthful feedback to their leaders that the big benefits of candor really take off.”
“Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
“Only say about someone what you will say to their face.”
“TELL THE EMPEROR WHEN HE HAS NO CLOTHES…The higher you get in an organization, the less feedback you receive, and the more likely you are to ‘come to work naked’ or make another error that’s obvious to everyone but you.”
“My performance would ultimately be judged, not on whether any individual bet failed, but on my overall ability to use those chips to move the business forward. Jack made it clear that at Netflix you don’t lose your job because you make a bet that doesn’t work out. Instead you lose your job for not using your chips to make big things happen or for showing consistently poor judgment over time.”
My Take
Surprisingly for a business book, No Rules Rules was a captivating read. The dynamic, unique culture (which focuses on empowering individual employees) at Netflix is very different from mainstream corporate America, but it works. This book was a page turner and I highly recommend it.
