This Netflix internal culture document was leaked almost a year ago. It’s an amazing document, enough to make you want to work at Netflix.
I’d love to talk to people at the company and find out if this is a fair reflection of the culture there.
The best bits of it for me are:
- Slides 9-19: The behaviours and skills valued at Netflix. This makes an amazing to-do list for employees (which of these do I not have?) and managers (which of these am I not considering when I hire?).
- The ‘we’re a sports team, not a family‘ theme that runs through the whole document.
- Slide 29: The idea that you only keep the people you’d fight hard for if they said they were leaving.
- Slide 33: Valuing how much, how quickly and how well do you get work done over time spent in the office.
- Slides 37-53: The logic that leads to Netflix’ goal to: Increase talent density faster than complexity grows. Just brilliant.
- Slide 59: The only necessary rules are those that prevent irrevocable disaster and those that maintain a company’s morals, ethics and the law.
- Slide 60: Fixing error is cheaper than preventing it (in creative industries). I love the simplicity of this logic and the way it overturns a broadly held (and often false) truth.
- Slide 71: “Act in Netflix’ best interests” = company’s five word expense policy.
- Slide 78: Managers should provide the insight and understanding to enable sound decisions. This is management by context rather than management by control.
- Slide 94: Remuneration on the basis of what the person could get elsewhere, what Netflix would pay for a replacement and what they’d pay to keep the person if they had an offer elsewhere. This is so insightful. People are individually ‘rehired’ each year on this basis, with Netflix paying top of market, regardless of the company’s overall performance.
- Slide 102: How to judge if remuneration is working right: Employees will take a step down in compensation for their next job, Netflix doesn’t counter-offer because they are paying the employee at max and employees will feel well paid.
- Slide 106: Big salaries over stock options. This is smart. How many people do you know ‘vesting in peace’, just waiting until after their next vesting date to quit.
- Slide 115: NO formalised development.
- Slide 127: An admission that the document is a work in progress.
This is one of those classic documents I think I’ll return to time and again to help me think about corporate culture in the same way I return Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language‘ (for writing), Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford (for living), Jonathan Harris’ ‘World Building‘ (for thinking about the web) and O’Reilly’s Work On Stuff That Matters (for perspective).
I love the way Netflix approach each aspect of their culture anew, discard ‘common knowledge’ or accepted practice and decide that the best thing for them is to pay people a lot, let them choose if they want to buy stock on their own and create a culture where employees determine their own path through clear context, not control by management.
Whoever prepared this document is smart.
And I think someone equally smart needs to prepare something for creating the best startup culture.