could you work at Netflix?

Last week an interesting powerpoint presentation made the rounds of the tech-community: Netflix’s “Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture“.  Yes, Netflix is a billion dollar, publicly traded company with 1,900 employees but even you, the little guy, needs to go through this slide deck.  Why?  Because Netflix has a very interesting approach to their values, corporate culture and conduct that could easily be applied to a small company.  But more importantly:

success is achieved through hiring great people who embody the core values

And the core values aren’t fluffy corporate-speak either.  They’re real and they are acted upon by who gets rewarded, promoted or let go.  They want to work with people who embody the following nine values (each are further explained in the 128 page slide deck):

• Judgment
• Communication
• Impact
• Curiosity
• Innovation
• Courage
• Passion
• Honesty
• Selflessness

and they want to create an environment where every employee is someone you respect and learn from.  And by hiring the “rare responsible person” they know they need to provide an environment of freedom and responsibility, innovation and self discipline (while they grow!), for that person to thrive in.

Now they do have rules (prevent irrevocable disaster, and moral, ethical, legal parameters) but they have very cleverly identified good and bad processes, provided a solid context for which the company operates and therefore, because they have hired responsible folk, they can do things like: (a) have no policies surrounding vacation taking and tracking and (b) have an expense, entertainment, gift, and travel policy of: “Act in Netflix’s Best Interests”.   Wow!  Is this nirvana?!?!

So the emphasis is on effectiveness, flexibility, retaining good people through pay, and not being afraid to let someone go if they’re doing a mediocre job.  It is nirvana - but only if you are disciplined enough to really hire good people who genuinely embody the values stated.  They must have an amazing recruiting machine.

Of course there are obvious operational implications (e.g. no vacation tracking would imply verbiage in the employment agreement that would not contravene employment standards) but they are publicly traded which requires a certain degree of internal controls so I am very encouraged.

And now my question to you:

do you posses the nine values?  are you the rare responsible person Netflix is looking for?

I don’t know how this deck made it on to the web but it was a genius bit of PR if they are on a hiring spree because I know loads of high performing individuals who are talking about it now.