No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

"No Rules Rules is about Netflix and the culture of Netflix. As you say, in being a book about corporate culture, it’s squarely in the traditional business book genre. What I liked about it was, first of all, that if you’re a serving CEO or executive writing a book about your company, it’s quite a high bar to cross because there’s a very strong tendency towards self-congratulation: you tend to gloss over the errors and big-up the successes. There is a certain amount of that in this book, but by pairing up with Erin Meyer—who is an academic writing about corporate culture and differences between corporate and indeed national cultures— the book is framed as a sort of dialogue. So Hastings will say something and then Erin Meyer will write a part that either takes issue with that or expands on it or fills in some of the intellectual and academic backing for what he has observed. And I think, for the most part, that works pretty well as a way of explaining Netflix and how it has been successful. “Once you’ve got the best team in place…then you can start to trust them with this no rules corporate culture” It clearly is a book about success. Netflix is one of the big companies that has obviously done particularly well under pandemic conditions, with people streaming boxsets and watching seasons and seasons of things via Netflix or other streaming services. But this book is less about the content—though there is a bit of that—and more about how Netflix works. Netflix, of course, was very famously a company that put its radical culture out there for scrutiny in the 2000s, when it published a slide deck—that you can still find online in its original and updated versions—explaining its culture of transparency, how it worked, why you had to behave in particular ways at Netflix. This became a sort of bible for Silicon Valley in particular. But few companies managed to match Netflix and that raises the question—which is partly what this book attempts to answer—of why it’s so difficult to replicate what Netflix does. I suppose I was saying that obviously it hasn’t been replicated. There have been very few companies that have done as well as Netflix has done. There is a certain ‘don’t try this at home’ aspect to the book. As well as having a dialogue, the book also has a progression: it shows you that you can’t do the most radical bits of the radical culture if you haven’t already done the first steps. So, critically, you have to have the right people on board in the first place. Once you’ve got the best team in place—and they talk very clearly about it being a team, not a family—then you can start to trust them with this no rules corporate culture. You can’t simply go straight to the idea that you’re going to let everybody decide their own schedule and holidays and all the radical, transparent things that they do, unless you’ve got the right people on board. I think one of the reasons this book has got through to the shortlist is that it’s not just a glib attempt to say, ‘here are all our secrets, now just put them all in place and it’ll transform your underperforming team.’ It’s saying, ‘you’re going to have to take some tough decisions before you can get to the point where you can get the most out of this radical culture.’ That’s probably true. On the longlist we did have a few more. There was another CEO- written book: Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term by David Cote, who used to be the CEO of Honeywell. I quite liked that book, but it didn’t get through to the shortlist."