Book Sips #46 — ‘No Rules Rules’ by Erin Meyer & Reed Hastings
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This is the kind of book you read and then immediately recommend it to friends and colleagues. Reading it sounds to probably 99% of all of us like heaven. Working with the most talented and skilled co-workers on the planet to create one massive success story after the other. Hastings and Meyer explain how Netflix has reinvented itself and what today's culture looks like. It’s a great resource for structuring company processes and giving more freedom and responsibility to every single employee. I enjoyed reading it a lot, and I have learned a lot. I especially like the mix of how the real-world examples from Netflix (mainly by Reed and interviews of many Netflix employees) are accompanied by a theoretical and more general explanation by Meyer. The only negative point was that the whole book and its tips only work if one precondition is met—the very high talent density. Not every company on this planet can have the best-talented people and therefore the suggestions and improvements are hard to get for the most of us working in normal companies.
A sip:
‘If you build an organization made up of high performers, you can eliminate most controls. The denser the talent, the greater the freedom you can offer. + Increase candor. Talented employees have an enormous amount to learn from one another.
About the book
Beyond the book
No Rules Rules
Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
by Erin Meyer, Reed Hastings
Why read?
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world’s most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies. At Netflix, Hastings set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, and giving employees context, not controls. At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies. At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance, and hard work is irrelevant. At Netflix, you don’t try to please your boss; you give candid feedback instead.
At Netflix, employees don’t need approval, and the company pays top of the market. When Hastings and his team first devised these unorthodox principles, the implications were unknown and untested. But in just a short period, their methods led to unparalleled speed and boldness, as Netflix quickly became one of the most loved brands in the world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees worldwide and never-before-told stories of trial and error from Hastings’s own career, No Rules Rules is the fascinating and untold account of the philosophy behind one of the world’s most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.
320 pages, Penguin 2020
Get this book here on Amazon!
