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Spoiler Alert: If for some reason you really want to go into Netflix's documentary, "Tell Them You Love Me" completely blind, then don't read this blog. I'm not sure why you'd want to do that. Or how you would even do that. If you've heard of this doc at all, then you probably know the gist of the story.
First things first. Consider this blog a fair warning. Do not under any circumstances let this woman, Dr. Anna Stubblefield anywhere within 100 miles of your non-verbal friends or family.
I watched this full documentary last night. I don't know what the fuck has gotten into Netflix lately, but between this and the horribly unsettling show Baby Reindeer, they seem hell bent on picking up the most disturbing pieces of content they can get their hands on.
I don't just want to sit here and type of the plot of the whole documentary, but in short, it's about a man named Derrick Johnson who is nonverbal, and has cerebral palsy. His whole life he has pretty much been entirely unable to communicate with anyone. Not even to those who spend time with him every day. Then along came Dr. Anna Stubblefield. Dr. Stubblefield claims she could use "facilitated communication" to help Derrick (i.e. D-Man, or DaMan as Anna insists on calling him for some reason), to communicate using a special keyboard. The family is thrilled with the idea at first. But then seemingly overnight, Derrick goes from have zero communication skills to typing out full, intelligent, well-educated sentences via his new keyboard. But since he has cerebral palsy, and has such poor motor skills, he needed Anna's help to physically guide his finger to the letters.
So you can see where a problem lies. Derrick has gone his entire life without being able to communicate. All of the sudden, this complete stranger is able to have highly intelligent conversation with him. But conveniently enough, nobody else in his family can do it. When his mom and brother try to help him use his keyboard, the words he types are nonsense. He can only communicate with Dr. Stubblefield guiding his hand to the letters. So is Derrick really communicating with the world? Or is this Anna bitch just having him say whatever the hell she wants him to.
The whole documentary is a mind fuck. I'm still not even sure if Anna thinks she's done anything wrong. I think there's a chance that in her own crazy messed up brain that she truly believes Derrick was speaking to her. That she has fully convinced herself the words she was making him say were actually his. That she was so blinded by wanting to believe that all this research she had done on facilitated communication was able to give Derrick a whole new life. That she wanted it to be true so bad that she just lost her damn mind.
The whole documentary is nuts. If you can stomach a story like that, I suppose I'd recommend giving it a watch. But to even recommend this to someone seems weird. However, if one good thing came out of it, it's that we now know to avoid Dr. Anna Stubblefield at all costs (not that she's still allowed to practice anymore, but still). And if you have a friend or loved one in a situation similar to Derrick's, be careful with who you trust them with. I know that should go without saying, but never in a million years would I have thought someone would do a thing like Dr. Stubblefield did. But unfortunately, with facilitated communication, this is far from the only case of sexual assault. I'm not going to speculate on why that happens. I feel like I'm already WAY too far out of my comfort zone with this blog. But there's a lot of disgusting people out there. You heard it here first.
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I was working with the board and senior management of a radio station last Friday on their strategy. The inevitable topic of digital disruption came up. It's clear radio is going to look very different over the next decade, but the question no one can answer is what will it look like and when?
Of course there are some principles here, which are probably the topic of a future post, about predicting the future. In fact I've blogged about this already. But in this domain of technology's impact on traditional industries (media, finance, transport, retail etc) it's safe to say that technology takes longer to bite than many expect, but its eventual impacts are far more profound than many predict.
Anyway in this workshop we started discussing the classic Netflix vs Blockbuster cautionary tale. This has become something of a business moral fable in recent times. You know how it goes. Blockbuster was caught wrong-footed by video streaming services. It could have bought Netflix for $50m in the mid 2000s, but it didn't, because Blockbuster misnamed the business it saw itself in. It was actually in the entertainment distribution and curation business, but it thought it was in the physical retail business (with its emphasis on turning its stores into convenience shops). Variations on this moral tale include: management wasn't competent enough to see the inevitable endgame; no-one wanted to disrupt the H1 business of physical stores and hasten their demise; etc.
And then the morality tale turns to Netflix. It had started as a business mailing out DVDs, with no late fees. It had then disrupted itself to become a streaming business of other people's content. And then it disrupted itself again to become a production house and produce its own content (Frank Underwood being the best character to emerge from their stable so far without doubt!). In this tale, Netflix management is competent, far sighted, courageous.
All of this may be true. But I can't help thinking that as we try to tell ourselves this story to discomfit ourselves ("don't be like Blockbuster's management") we are at the same time actually doing the opposite. It's kind of comforting to tell ourselves that Blockbuster's management was too incompetent to see the end game. Too timid to disrupt their physical stores. Too obtuse to know what business they were actually in. It's comforting to say: "We are not like that. We are smarter, more far seeing, more courageous than Blockbuster's management. Their fate isn't ours. In fact, we are like Netflix's management - agile, far seeing, brave enough to blow up our own business to let new growth bloom."
In fact, I wonder whether there was something far deeper going on. Bigger than management and strategy. Something in the respective "systems" and cultures in Blockbuster and Netflix, bigger than the people themselves, that almost inevitably meant that their fates were sealed. I wonder whether there was something in the DNA of the organisations, in their business models, in their ways of measurement, that meant that the decisions they would make were pretty much locked in. I suggest, in fact, that if you transplanted Netflix's management into Blockbuster, I reckon Blockbuster would still have collapsed. There were bigger forces in play here than leadership and management decisions on strategy.
Now, I don't have proof for this. I just find the current analysis a little bit too convenient and self serving. When I tell myself that morality tale, I feel comfortable, and I'm not sure that's a good way to feel in business these days.
So, is this a counsel of despair? Is your business's fate sealed by bigger forces beyond your control? Well, to some extent, maybe. But hopefully not. I guess this is an appeal to look deeper at what happens when businesses get disrupted by technology and not to assume that the incumbents were too fat and lazy to see what was about to happen to them.
And I do wonder whether the answer is less in trying to see the future and come up with a great strategy, and more in creating the kind of organisation - systems, business models, culture, etc - that makes it a bit easier to be a Netflix and not a Blockbuster as the future unfolds.
Most of us were taught to tell stories in chronological order, from beginning to end. But the most captivating narratives tease audiences with an anecdote from the heart of the plot. This technique draws the reader in with a question: how did we get here?
One of the most important mandates at Netflix was that people talk openly about issues with one another. That went for subordinates, colleagues, and bosses. We wanted honesty to flow up and down, all around the company.
With Reed, things couldn't have been more different. When I interviewed with him, one of his first questions was, "What's your HR philosophy?" Remember, I'd worked at Sun and at Borland, so I answered in my fluent HR-speak: "Reed, I believe that everyone should draw a line from their personal ambitions and integrity and become empowered to contribute." He looked at me and said, "Do you even speak English? You know what you just said didn't mean anything, right? Those words don't even string together into a logical sentence."
When I got home that day and my husband asked me how the interview had gone, I told him, "Well, I got into a fight with the CEO." Fortunately, I got the job, and I quickly came to love how blunt Reed and I could be with each other. He always challenged my assumptions and called out any HR truisms I might spout, and that felt great. I felt respected. Reed never coddled me in the slightest, and I loved the way he pushed me to keep finding new ways to improve the business. As soon as I had accomplished something I was really proud of, he would say, "Okay, that was great! So now what?"
One of the pillars of the Netflix culture was that if people had a problem with an employee or with how a colleague in their own department or somewhere else in the company was doing something, they were expected to talk about it openly with that person, ideally face to face. We didn't want any criticizing behind people's backs.
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