The New York Times bestsellerShortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the YearNetflix cofounder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world’s most innovative, imaginative, and successful companiesThere has never before been a company like Netflix. It has led nothing short of a revolution in the entertainment industries, … short of a revolution in the entertainment industries, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue while capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people in over 190 countries. But to reach these great heights, Netflix, which launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, has had to reinvent itself over and over again. This type of unprecedented flexibility would have been impossible without the counterintuitive and radical management principles that cofounder Reed Hastings established from the very beginning. Hastings rejected the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate and defied tradition to instead build a culture focused on freedom and responsibility, one that has allowed Netflix to adapt and innovate as the needs of its members and the world have simultaneously transformed.
Hastings set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, and giving employees context, not controls. At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies. At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance, and hard work is irrelevant. At Netflix, you don’t try to please your boss, you give candid feedback instead. At Netflix, employees don’t need approval, and the company pays top of market. When Hastings and his team first devised these unorthodox principles, the implications were unknown and untested. But in just a short period, their methods led to unparalleled speed and boldness, as Netflix quickly became one of the most loved brands in the world.
Here for the first time, Hastings and Erin Meyer, bestselling author of The Culture Map and one of the world’s most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial ideologies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from Hastings’s own career, No Rules Rules is the fascinating and untold account of the philosophy behind one of the world’s most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.
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Great book for corporate leaders
Interesting Look At Business Practices Less Common Than Many Claim. Let me be clear here: I am a 14+ year professional software developer in my “day job”. I’ve worked for very small companies with barely 100 people and owned by a single person all the way to one of the largest companies on the planet (Fortune 50). And because I’ve had a 14 year career in this field as of 2021, that means this has all been done since NetFlix has been doing its thing.
And yet while I’ve heard that the Valley works a bit differently than the East Coast / Southern companies I’ve worked for, I’d never heard of several of the policies Hastings and Meyer discuss in this text. For this developer, most of them sound *phenomenal*, and I would *love* to work in environments that had them. Though there are others – “Adequate performance is given a generous severance” in particular – that would exacerbate issues I’ve already had at times in my career. Here, Hastings explains the reasons he adopted these policies at NetFlix and how they have grown over the company’s existence. Meyer provides a degree of “outsider feedback” going around interviewing people at all levels from Hastings to the janitors and examining the claims Hastings makes.
Overall, this is a solid business book explaining these policies, why NetFlix chose them, why other businesses should – or should not, in certain situations – and how they can begin to be implemented in any company. More for Executives than heads down coders or low level team leads, though there are some interesting points even at those levels. It is absolutely something business leaders should read and ponder, and it is a good primer for those who may want to push for similar changes in their own companies. Very much recommended.
We all have done it: turned on our smart televisions, laptops and game consoles and navigated to the giant red and black logo with the words “NETFLIX,” on it. Netflix, from humble beginnings in the late 1990s (see That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph) has grown into a powerhouse of cinematic viewing and streaming. While they have evolved from their inception of DVD rentals to producing massive amounts of original content, Netflix has kept one thing the same and what has worked for them: culture. In this book by Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix and Erin Meyer, author on the topic of culture, a deep dive into the culture of Netflix and their policies acts as an immense case study for what has worked for them and continues to do so as they grow their success. Written with actual events, insights, interviews with employees and a 360 view of the internals of the company, No Rules Rules gives readers a deep dive to Netflix and how the policies they have adopted may ring true to application in your own organization. Readers of business culture and business students alike should pick this one up for the originality and draw salient points from it. It may behoove readers to read Marc Randolph’s book (see above) before reading this one as a two-part series on Netflix’s origins, rise to popularity and their continued cultural success.
Reed Hastings learned early what it takes to build an enduring great company. Here in No Rules Rules, he and Erin Meyer teach the culture that propelled Netflix into one of the most distinctive and impactful companies on the planet. Packed with vivid specifics, they illustrate how Hastings melded a spicy concoction into a framework of freedom and responsibility. Well-written and fast-paced, timeless and timely, inspired and practical, smart and wise — read it and learn the Netflix secret sauce from the master himself!