Reed Hastings > Quotes

“Lead with context, not control,” and coaching your employees using such guidelines as, “Don’t seek to please your boss.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“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.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“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.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“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.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“If you give employees more freedom instead of developing processes to prevent them from exercising their own judgment, they will make better decisions and it’s easier to hold them accountable.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“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.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“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.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“HIGH PERFORMANCE + SELFLESS CANDOR = EXTREMELY HIGH PERFORMANCE”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“above all you have to be humble, you have to be curious, and you have to remember to listen before you speak and to learn before you teach. With this approach, you can’t help but become more effective every day in this ever-fascinating multicultural world.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“symphony isn’t what you’re going for. Leave the conductor and the sheet music behind. Build a jazz band instead. Jazz emphasizes individual spontaneity. The musicians know the overall structure of the song but have the freedom to improvise, riffing off one another other, creating incredible music. Of course, you can’t just remove the rules and processes, tell your team to be a jazz band, and expect it to be so. Without the right conditions, chaos will ensue. But now, after reading this book, you have a map. Once you begin to hear the music, keep focused. Culture isn’t something you can build up and then ignore. At Netflix, we are constantly debating our culture and expecting it will continually evolve. To build a team that is innovative, fast, and flexible, keep things a little bit loose. Welcome constant change. Operate a little closer toward the edge of chaos. Don’t provide a musical score and build a symphonic orchestra. Work on creating those jazz conditions and hire the type of employees who long to be part of an improvisational band. When it all comes together, the music is beautiful.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“My goal was to make employees feel like owners and, in turn, to increase the amount of responsibility they took for the company’s success. However, opening company secrets to employees had another outcome: it made our workforce smarter.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“Netflix treats employees like adults who can handle difficult information and I love that. This creates enormous feelings of commitment and buy-in from employees.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“In a fast and innovative company, ownership of critical, big-ticket decisions should be dispersed across the workforce at all different levels, not allocated according to hierarchical status.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“TALENT DENSITY: TALENTED PEOPLE MAKE ONE ANOTHER MORE EFFECTIVE”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“Farm for dissent,” or “socialize” the idea. For a big idea, test it out. As the informed captain, make your bet. If it succeeds, celebrate. If it fails, sunshine it.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“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.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“if you hire a high-performing chef and give her free range to cook what she wants, but you haven’t shared that your family hates salt and that any salad dressing with sugar will be rejected by all, it’s likely your household of fusspots won’t like the meal delivered to their plates. In this case, it’s not your chef’s fault. It’s yours. You hired the right person, but you didn’t provide enough context. You gave your cook freedom, but you and your chef were not aligned.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“was not obvious at the time, even to me, but we had one thing that Blockbuster did not: a culture that valued people over process, emphasized innovation over efficiency, and had very few controls. Our culture, which focused on achieving top performance with talent density and leading employees with context not control, has allowed us to continually grow and change as the world, and our members’ needs, have likewise morphed around us.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“She found a way to calculate how much money his moodiness was costing the business. She spoke to him in his own financial language, adding a shot of her infectious humor to the communication, and Barry was moved. He went back to his team, told them about the feedback he’d received, and asked them to call him out when his mood was influencing their actions. The results were remarkable. In the subsequent weeks and months, many on the finance team spoke to me and Patty about the positive change in Barry’s leadership.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“But when one employee abuses your trust, deal with the individual case and double your commitment to continue transparency with the others. Do not punish the majority for the poor behavior of a few.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“The more you and others in your company respond to all candid moments with belonging cues, the more courageous people will be in their candor.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“At Netflix, we emphasize that it’s fine to disagree with your manager and to implement an idea she dislikes. We don’t want people putting aside a great idea because the manager doesn’t see how great it is.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“that—no matter where you come from—when it comes to working across cultural differences, talk, talk, talk.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“That’s when we added a new element to our culture. We now say that it is disloyal to Netflix when you disagree with an idea and do not express that disagreement. By withholding your opinion, you are implicitly choosing to not help the company.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“Studies show that well over half the population will readily cheat the system to get more for themselves if they think they won’t be caught.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“In many companies in the US, when a manager decides to let go of someone, he is required to put in place a process called a performance improvement plan (PIP). This means that the manager documents weekly discussions with the employee over a period of months, demonstrating in writing that the employee has not managed to succeed despite feedback. PIPs rarely help employees improve and they delay the firing by many weeks.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“The fall of 2017, one of our leaders, who unbeknownst to us, struggled with alcohol addiction and fell off the wagon on a business trip. He immediately entered rehab. What should we tell his staff? His boss believed that we should follow the Netflix culture and tell everyone the truth. Human Resources insisted that he should have the right to choose what he shared about his personal challenges. In this case, I agreed with HR. When it comes to personal struggles, an individual’s right to privacy trumps an organization’s desire for transparency. Here we didn’t take the most transparent route. But we didn’t spin either. We told everyone that the guy had taken two weeks off for personal reasons. It was up to him to share more details if he chose.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“If you trust your people to handle appropriately sensitive information, the trust you demonstrate will instigate feelings of responsibility and your employees will show you just how trustworthy they are.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“This is the nub of F&R. If your people choose to abuse the freedom you give them, you need to fire them and fire them loudly, so others understand the ramifications. Without this, freedom doesn’t work.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

“but we had one thing that Blockbuster did not: a culture that valued people over process, emphasized innovation over efficiency, and had very few controls.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention