No Rules Rules

If your business model depends on inducing feelings of stupidity in your customer base, you can hardly expect to build much loyalty. Was there another model to provide the pleasure of watching movies in your own living room without inflicting the pain of paying a lot when you forgot to return them?

In May 1998, we launched Netflix

In hindsight, I understood that a team with one or two merely adequate performers brings down the performance of everyone on the team

The day of the layoffs arrived, and it was awful, as expected. Those who we laid off cried, slammed doors, and shouted in frustration. By noon it was finished, and I waited for the second half of the storm: the backlash from the remaining employees. . . . But, despite some tears and visible sorrow, all was calm. Then, within a few weeks, for a reason I couldn’t initially understand, the atmosphere improved dramatically. We were in cost-cutting mode, and we’d just let go of a third of the workforce, yet the office was suddenly buzzing with passion, energy, and ideas

If there is one thing we hate more than receiving criticism one-on-one, it is to receive that negative feedback in front of others. The woman who gave me feedback in the middle of my keynote address (and in front of her colleagues) helped me a lot. She had input that could benefit me and it couldn’t wait. But receiving feedback in front of the group sends off danger alarms in the human brain. The brain is a survival machine, and one of our most successful survival techniques is the desire to find safety in numbers. Our brain is constantly on the watch for signals of group rejection, which back in more primitive times would have led to isolation and potentially death. If someone calls out a mistake you are making in front of your tribe, the amygdala, the most primitive part of the brain, which is on constant watch for danger, sets off a warning: “This group is about to reject you.”

teaching your managers principles like, “Lead with context, not control,” and coaching your employees using such guidelines as, “Don’t seek to please your boss.”

+ Build up talent density

One study showed people spend twice as much time thinking about their secrets as they do actively concealing them.

Today, in the information age, what matters is what you achieve, not how many hours you clock, especially for the employees of creative companies like Netflix.

The brain is a survival machine, and one of our most successful survival techniques is the desire to find safety in numbers. O