No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
May 9, 2021 — May 27, 2021
Los Angeles, CA
A gift from Henry Elkus, Founder and CEO of Helena
A great way to end one year of this library, by reading a great book about a stellar company with a phenomenal culture. I really enjoyed this book, it made me reflect a lot on my work atmosphere and shifted my leadership style as well. I’m excited to read more next year, however, I’ll be limiting my reading as duties have piled up. As for this book, it’s all about a great and unique culture. In my opinion, company culture is the most important component of an organization, a great company culture is priceless. Netflix is known for having a unique and stellar company culture, built on "freedom and responsibility." This book was written as collection of monologues by the CEO of Netflix and his co-author who's writer and professor, including personal and professional stories, stories and messages from Netflix employees throughout the years, examples of how they sketched out their culture and timelines of their learning process, behind-the-scene stories behind Netflix's shows and movies to present their learning experiences, and each chapter is concluded with a summary of the aspect of their culture with researched-based suggestions tied with lessons learned from their experience and their takeaways. What I appreciated the most is this books ability to dive into each aspect of the culture and present it with transparency in their thought process and decision-making in forming the culture, addressing any potential arguments and explaining possible misunderstandings, and providing their experiences and backing it with research to tie it all into a: culture of reinvention. I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s in a position of management or someone being managed by an “innovative” startup or company. The concept of freedom and responsibility simply makes sense, prioritizing people's ability to thrive over a strict process that limits them, while setting expectations that must be met to remain at the top of your game.
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The book is broken down into 10 sections, each presenting an aspect of how they create, adopt, and build up their culture. Building up talent density, increasing candor (radical transparency with positive intent), removing controls (their popular for their vacation policy, travel and expense approvals), fortifying their talent and maintaining a high employee retention rate by paying top of the personal market, pumping up their candor by putting everything on the books, and not having any decision-making approvals required to proceed. To reinforce their culture, they have a Keeper’s Test to max up their talent, a Circle of Feedback to max up their candor, and philosophy of leading with context, and not control. Finally, they present their experience of going global, their Culture maps that discuss difference of cultures in communication and management throughout their international offices.
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The concept that stood out to me the most is how they truly give their employees ultimate freedom in decision-making, their leaders being on the ground working alongside employees to avoid an inefficient decision hierarchy and providing context to their decisions, thus creating a thriving and efficient environment where each employee’s talent and creativity is truly brought out. Their results explain themselves. Additionally, it was how Netflix pays, they literally have their own employees send out applications to other companies and ask recruiters about the pay so Netflix can continue being competitive and pay their employees more. The team philosophy also amazed me, by thinking of the team as a sports team rather than a family, where people are selected and kept based on their stellar performance and ability to continue winning. If they’re not excelling, they’re booted, because your sports team with athletes are here to win, this is not a family where there can be exceptions. At the same time, everyone is treated well and builds friendships with each other. Finally, the aspect of adjusting culture’s based on each international office’s national culture was very interesting; usually I find in many books I read, people’s culture isn’t taken into account or mentioned, or it’s geared towards Western/American corporate culture, this book didn’t do that at all. It actually dove deep into people’s culture, dedicating an entire section to it.
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As I’ve been talking to my good friend Kenny Lin (he gave me my first book for this library), we’ve discussed company culture a lot. When we weighed different companies’ pros and cons, we looked at how culture truly was the determining factor. “A great company culture is priceless.”