Netflix Culture Deck

An EOS client of mine made me aware of this Netflix Culture PowerPoint deck.

It was created by Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, and Patty McCord, Chief Talent Officer at Netflix from 1998 to 2012, and has been viewed more than 5 million times.

You can read the Harvard Business Review article, which also contains the PowerPoint deck, authored by Patty McCord here. She summarizes five of the central ideas that she, Hastings, and a few other colleagues focused on when they created the deck.

Few could argue with its success, given the success of Netflix. It is great food for thought for any company. You should read her article, page through the deck, and then see my observations below.

The Netflix Culture Deck

Culture by Reed Hastings

Five Lessons From the Netflix Culture Deck

I am going to comment on the Netflix principles from an EOS point of view.

1. Create a culture based on values.

   I love that Netflix says values are behaviors and skills. EOS would say behaviors and traits. They aren’t what Patrick Lencioni calls permission-to-play, aspirational, or accidental values. Rather, they are what exists in your company, and they are what attracts people to or repels them from you.

2. Prioritize fit and performance in each role.

   EOS calls roles “seats.” Some nuggets: A great workplace is stunning colleagues. Adequate performance gets a generous severance package. Netflix is like a professional sports team, not a little league team.

   In procedural work, the best are twice as effective as their peers. In creative and inventive work—and I would include sales and marketing in this category—the best are 10 times more effective than their peers. Increase talent density faster than complexity grows.

3. Manage through context rather than control.

   Pure EOS. Clear roles and responsibilities. Clear measurements. Clear objectives and expectations. Then trust that the best people will get the work done better than you might.

4. Share the Vision and trust people to execute it.

   Being highly coupled around a shared Vision and loosely aligned through trust applies nicely to how we expect executive leaders to behave and lead their teams. It relates directly to the third principle.

5. Align retention, morale, promotion, and development with the culture.

   The remainder of the slides address retention, morale, promotion, and development. They are all worth reading. The ideas are radical, but they make sense in the context of Netflix’s culture of creativity, self-discipline, freedom, and responsibility.

   Netflix also walks the talk. Its compensation, vacation, and expense policies are probably unlike anything you have experienced.

Could These Principles Work in Your Company?

Would you dare implement policies like these? Have you?

A strong culture requires more than unconventional policies. It requires clearly defined Core Values and the discipline to surround yourself with people who consistently demonstrate them.

Use the People Analyzer^® to evaluate how consistently your people live your Core Values and whether they are in the right seats.