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Helen Drewski
As we all know, a strong presentation starts with a strong Title slide. It's the first impression; the outfit your presentation wears; the "tone setter" for the entire talk...aka a very important part of the equation. Let's see how Netflix did.
We do this by having a more prominent logo displayed, using a bold but modern color palette (we used the exact hex codes for Netflix's primary and secondary reds and grays), a clean, sans serif font, balanced, congruent layout of elements on the slide, and a professional presentation byline at the bottom. All these little things come together to say "this is a professional document." And what's more important to company culture than a strong brand?
The original Netflix presentation then used the next 12 slides (yes, 12!) to communicate their solution to the problems that arise from rapid company growth, with each slide featuring line after line of text. Not one image or attractive graph or anything, just text. Aka the cardinal SIN of great presentations. (You'll also notice lots of random lines going up and to the right in the original version, but let's ignore those for now before we have an aneurysm).
What's more inspiring: a bunch of san serif text on a white background, or a gorgeous ocean scene that illustrates the sentiment of the inspirational quote and gets you excited about contributing to the team? Yeah, we thought so. This one's pretty obvious, so let's move on.
So we have to give Netflix a little credit here. They actually used some color on this slide. Nice! But they could have taken things one step further and chosen supporting imagery to paint a vivid picture of the differences between these three models of corporate teamwork. Our version of slide 90 (yes, it's a long document) offers what none of Netflix's 125 slides do not: context. And because 65% of the population are visual learners, you gotta give 'em visuals if you want them to retain the information you're presenting.
And voila! The Netflix: Culture presentation just went from Blah to Beautiful, in minutes. Check out the finished product below, and download a customizable version to use as inspiration for your own company culture presentation or start from scratch.
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There is a famous Peter Drucker quote which goes, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". I was younger and more naive when I came across the said quote years ago, and found it quite memorable and quotable. But I couldn't really understand how culture could make a meal out of strategy. Nowadays, with a little more maturity and leadership responsibilities, I think about culture - for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sometimes in my dreams. I should make it clear that the "Culture" I am referring to is not the one endemic to nations, religious or ethno-linguistic groups, but to Corporate groups. I am talking about the Culture at work. I have been reading about cultures at world class organizations, so when Reed Hastings, along with Erin Meyer, decided to pen down the culture he created at Netflix, the timing couldn't have been better.
No rules rules is a part-biographical and a part how-to-guide of how Mr. Hastings went about creating the culture that seems to be one of the factors for the great success Netflix has enjoyed. Netflix, which is turning 23, is a company that is coming from the era of cassette-tape video rentals, and has survived four major transitions.
Mind boggling, isn't it? Vertical integration in the Entertainment industry, at its best. I am sure that while culture alone couldn't explain all the success, it must account for some part of it. It is worth noting that Mr. Hastings didn't get it right the first time. His approach to creating the culture in his prior venture, Pure Software, was quite traditional. Neither did the thought of creating a ground-breaking culture strike him when he started Netflix. It was only when Netflix had survived the first few years, that included the dot-com-boom and a round of retrenchment, and attained some stability that Mr. Hastings consciously set about creating a culture that would eventually become a competitive advantage. My own takeaway from this is that in the early stages of a startup, where each day is a quest for survival, attempting a Netflix might be impractical, if not impossible. But I suppose, the earlier you start, the better off you might be.
Eleven years before the release of this book, in 2009, Netflix shared its culture in the form of a 125 slide-long presentation to the world. Even if you don't have the time, patience or inclination to plough through this book, it would be a worthwhile investment to flip through the slides at least once, and let your eyes rest at the eye-popping bits, such as:
The aforementioned policies are a part of the radical culture at Netflix. I especially like the analogy of Netflix being a corporate team, and its employees being the players. This makes so much more sense than the use of the "we-are-a-family" analogy. If your daughter or your uncle are not meeting their "KPI's", can you fire them from your "family"? Business is a team sport, and the idea of companies akin to Corporate teams makes so much sense.
Another great thing about the Netflix culture is the emphasis on leading with context and not with control. Whether or not you have the stomach to implement "no vacation policy" policy, the idea of leading with context is a sound one that can and should be implemented from Day one. It is much easier said than done, but, if you are able to achieve even moderate success in leading with context, the people you lead would be so empowered.
The approach to writing this book is quite interesting as well. It was written by Reed Hastings, one of the founders and CEO of Netflix, and Erin Meyers, a professor at INSEAD whose specialty is how to navigate cultural differences in a global environment (I also recommend Erin Meyer's "The Culture Map" if you want to go down the culture rabbit hole). This ensured that the book is much more balanced, and you also get to hear the story from somebody who is not heavily invested in Netflix. The book is replete with examples of how this culture came to be and how various employees have learned to imbibe through trials and tribulations, both successfully and unsuccessfully.
I highly recommend this book for leaders at any level, and in any company throughout the world. You might say that what works for Netflix, a technology company birthed in one of the most advanced Western industrialized nations, will most probably not work anywhere else. Obviously not. Cultural practices cannot be imported from one organization to the other, that goes without a saying. But the ideas in the book and the motivation behind those ideas are very well worth ruminating over. At the end of the day, we all have to come up with our own version of the rules that would work and the culture that we want at our workplaces. All Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer have done is to show us the possibilities.
I like the attitude and a number of the concrete examples that prove they're not just spouting theory without practice. But 128 slides to convey all that? They'd do well to cut to the chase of their concrete examples and compress the explanations. Specifically, they could compress sequences like slides 4-21 and 38-58, and instead focus on the actions that speak louder than words: their comp, vacation, and expense policies.Here's a test for this and any other culture manifesto: what parts of it would 99% of companies have no trouble agreeing with? Cut those parts out; it's the rest that communicates your distinctive culture.
The more neutral a company is, more customers the company should reach. A good company should be driven by the culture knowledge of cultural dependancies. Not so easy for business organizations, but far away for actual capacities of many governmental or not organizations
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of cloud EPM vendor Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs in a competitive market, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of NoSQL database provider MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over 6 years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. I started my career in technical and product marketing positions at Ingres and Versant.
I love disruption, startups, and Silicon Valley and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, FloQast, GainSight, Hex, Logikcull, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, and Tableau.
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Cockcroft: I'm Adrian Cockcroft. I'm going to talk to you about microservices retrospective: what we learned and what we didn't learn from Netflix. I was at Netflix from 2007 to the end of 2013. We're going to look a bit at that, and some of the early slide decks that I ran through at the time. It's a retrospective. I don't really know that much about retrospectives, but a good friend of mine does. I read some of Aino's book, and figured that there's a whole lot of these agile rituals being mentioned in this book, along with retrospectives. It turns out, Netflix was extremely agile, but was not extreme, and was not agile. We did extreme and agile with a lowercase e and a lowercase a, we did not have the rituals of a full extreme, or full agile. I don't remember anyone being a scrum master of all of those kinds of things. We're going to talk a fair amount about the Netflix culture. The Netflix culture is nicely documented in this book, "Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility," by Patty McCord, who ran the HR processes and talent. Basically, she was the CTO for Netflix, which was the Chief Talent Officer. Amazing woman, you can see some of her talks. I figured that I should adopt some of the terminology anyway. I've got some story points. I'm going to talk about some Netflix culture. Pick up some of the slide decks from those days. Go over some of the things that were mentioned, and then comment on them. What we did. What we didn't do. What seemed to work. What got left out along the way. I'll talk a bit about why don't microservices work for some people. Then a little bit at the end, just talking about systems thinking and innovation.
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