BR#26: Culture Not Strategy

Last week, I was listening to a podcast with Reed Hastings, who is the Co-founder and Chairman at Netflix and served as its CEO for 25 years.

He talked about how Netflix embraced and valued company culture above strategy.

In essence, the driving principle is that if you are good at finding and hiring great people, you can achieve outstanding results by granting those people the freedom and authority to do the best jobs they can. The opposite of that would be telling them what to do and how to do it.

Netflix of course isn’t alone in taking that approach. Some companies value culture above strategy, others prefer to have people work like a factory, where the name of the game is operational efficiency. It’s all about staying within your predefined bounds so that leadership can maximise its control over operations.

As a freelancer, I was able (and lucky enough) to work with companies on both sides of the spectrum and I’ve always preferred working with companies that lead like Netflix in that regard.

I’ve always been far more drawn to leadership styles that focus on empowering teams to really own and be responsible for their respective departments and objectives.

And here are some of the key reasons why: