A Trust Story — Netflix — Context, not Control

In 2009, Netflix published the now famous “Culture Deck”, 120 slides, a manifesto for the revolutionary culture created at Netflix.

Sheryl Sandberg famously referred to this deck as “the most important document ever to come out of the valley”. It is still available to view and very much worth reading in full.

So. what is so special about the Netflix culture, and, now that this 2009 deck has been updated and abbreviated to 10 pages of prose, what can I synthesiste and distil for you in a post of no more than two pages of prose ?

I’m passionate about smashing paradigms in general, and particularly in the idea that businesses need to be run by all powerful leaders and a “command and control” strategy.

At a level that still will seem only slightly less esoteric to the majority of business leaders, Netflix have fundamentally smashed paradigms on the need for command and control leadership and continue to evolve their culture as with their June 2017 update.

So, as a leader reading this post, I ask you to take a few minutes to read both the 2009 deck and then the 2017 update, then come back and below I capture what to me is the essence of all of this.

Image from Steve Urbans’s article on LI (see below)