No Rules Rules
Just finished reading “No Rules Rules” curious to hear from people at Netflix how well the book actually represents the day to day culture at Netflix. I know sometimes there’s a definitive difference between a company’s espoused culture and their actual culture. Were there any pieces of the book that you thought were an inaccurate representation of netflix? Or anything that was portrayed as beneficial that is actually problematic?
Our talent density is not as high as advertised. And many B players can survive. It's pretty accurate otherwise.
+1 I am one of the B player
Have you ever seen it cause problems? Specifically has the lack of control mechanisms ever been a problem without the high talent density?
I remember the book says no annual objective/goal/KPI setting because that hinders agility and adaptivity. Is that actually true in Netflix? I can hardly imagine any business can run well without long-term and short-term objective/goal setting.
Very curious about this myself actually. I’ve only ever seen a very poorly run MBO system. But as a fan of “Inspired”, using quarterly business objectives and kpi’s seems like a good way to make sure everyone is working towards the same strategic goals. Though maybe they just don’t tie those goals into bonuses at Netflix.
You are constantly evaluated in keeper test.
Another thing I’m curious to learn from Netflixers is that the book talks about individuals can be informed captains and are encouraged to make big decisions. If things go wrong, learn from it, sunshine the learning, and do better next time. But who is held accountable here? Is it the individual who made the decision, or is it their direct manager, or even the entire management chain if the failure is big enough? My guess is that the team manager will still be ultimately responsible for the impact of that decision, even though the individual on the team was the decision maker. Reason being stakeholders normally see the manager of a team own the responsibility and accountability for decisions out of their team.
What do you mean by “responsible”? No one blames people for making the bad decision. Both IC and their managers are given opportunities to learn from the results of the decisions. Also you are not making decisions in isolation - if the decision is big then your team, your manager, your skip will know about your decision. They can provide guidance, help, feedback. It’s not a persons fault if the decision is incorrect, it’s just a learning opportunity for the team and a company as a whole. We also test pretty much 99% of technical decisions via AB tests.
The informed captain is not chosen randomly. Obviously it's someone with the experience and position. For big decisions (greenlight a show worth $100M for example), there are certain approval processes. But it's safe to say the decisions are in the hands of much lower level staff compared to legacy studios, that's how Netflix can scale and produce so much content
Pretty good