No Rules Rules
Ratings37
Average rating4
Netflix's corporate culture is a must! Whether you're an employee or an employer, this book will give you real insights on how to gain perspective and build a flexible, long lasting and growth-oriented team. It is highly applicable in any situation, and the improvements will hugely outweigh the risks involved in getting out of the corporate comfort of assiduous control.
Good reference material, especially around feedback, even for “process and control” environments.
This was good! Actionable, engaging, compelling. It helps that I am aligned with the idea of providing freedom and responsibility to team members already.
First business book in a whole that hasn't felt redundant.
Interesting Look At Business Practices Less Common Than Many Claim. Let me be clear here: I am a 14+ year professional software developer in my “day job”. I've worked for very small companies with barely 100 people and owned by a single person all the way to one of the largest companies on the planet (Fortune 50). And because I've had a 14 year career in this field as of 2021, that means this has all been done since NetFlix has been doing its thing.
And yet while I've heard that the Valley works a bit differently than the East Coast / Southern companies I've worked for, I'd never heard of several of the policies Hastings and Meyer discuss in this text. For this developer, most of them sound phenomenal, and I would love to work in environments that had them. Though there are others - “Adequate performance is given a generous severance” in particular - that would exacerbate issues I've already had at times in my career. Here, Hastings explains the reasons he adopted these policies at NetFlix and how they have grown over the company's existence. Meyer provides a degree of “outsider feedback” going around interviewing people at all levels from Hastings to the janitors and examining the claims Hastings makes.
Overall, this is a solid business book explaining these policies, why NetFlix chose them, why other businesses should - or should not, in certain situations - and how they can begin to be implemented in any company. More for Executives than heads down coders or low level team leads, though there are some interesting points even at those levels. It is absolutely something business leaders should read and ponder, and it is a good primer for those who may want to push for similar changes in their own companies. Very much recommended.
I really enjoyed reading this and found the book quite fascinating, getting to know the inner workings of Netflix and how their operations run, some of their policies kinda freak me out, mainly the one around expenses, but that's me.
Definitely a few nuggets I took out for myself as a team leader.
The first half of the book explains Reed's experience with leading teams prior to Netflix and then taking those learnings and applying them to Netflix culture. He talks about how to apply same or similar culture in your own team/company and why you should do so.
The second half of the book is basically Culture Map v2 on the examples of Netflix. So that's a recommended pre-reading although not necessary.
Overall a good book with many interesting points. But, as usual with this kind of books, could easily be 90% shorter without compromising the main points.
TL;DR: Trust your employees and be hones with them.