Its always interesting to read these broad visionary executive statements in contrast to the 'boots on the ground' nitty gritty such as the reviews of Netflix on Glassdoor:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Netflix-Reviews-E11891.htm

Incongruences are notable.

They updated this in 2011, by the way:

http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

We talked about this back in 2009: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740524

I'm very curious how (or if at all) this thinking has been applied to Netflix's hourly employees. Basic customer service, distribution center folks, etc who have more structured jobs to do. The distinction is briefly touched on at the beginning, but I'd love to hear more.

I read this, and I had a ridiculous number of "Aha!" moments. A few for me:

-Context vs. control: In any place where your expecting creative contribution, it makes literally zero sense to define the contribution by the input. You hire people for their output, not their input.

-Vacation tracking: If you're not tracking how many hours the employees do work, you're already not tracking how many they don't work -- by definition.

-Generous severance: This way your managers don't feel bad firing people that aren't a good fit.

One thing that stands out here is the work-life balance for employees will not be there and Netflix does not think they should care about it. Given that they measure the effectiveness of the employee, one can always be more effective if he/she works longer hours every single day. Same goes with the no vacation tracking policy. That only means there are no vacation. You are getting paid so deal with it :)

Of course startups in the valley are in general not big on work-life balance anyway.

I really like slide #7, in how it discusses that most "corporate values" are just these ambiguous ethereal ideals that don't necessarily mean anything.

> "[Enron's values] were chiseled in marble in the main lobby, but had little to do with the real values of the organization."

I wish other major employers would see this and realize how self-parodying they can be.

I've always wondered how these slides applied to their CEO as their stock went from 300 to 66 and, in particular, the comparison to sports teams--although per their slides it's not a perfect comparison.

So when would it ever be time to trade the CEO?

Is every employee given a year or two to turn things around?

Most points in this document are great, except for the argument about high salary in lieu of high bonuses and great benefits.

High bonuses have worked well for Wall St traders, as well as for exec-level employees in all industries. And great benefits clearly work well, as proven by Google.

undefined

This document is a fantastic read, highly recommend everybody to check it out

If you need 129 slides to explain your culture, there is definitely something wrong with it.

It's interesting that while Netflix is quite successful overall it has made some hugely bad decisions (silverlight, qwikster, house of cards release). You wonder if Netflix culture is a contributor.