Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

We wanted people to feel excited to come to work each day, not despite the challenges but because of them.

The Netflix culture wasn’t built by developing an elaborate new system for managing people; we did the opposite. We kept stripping away policies and procedures.

But over time I saw that all of those policies and systems were enormously costly, time-consuming, and unproductive. Even more important, I saw that they were premised on false assumptions about human beings: that most people must be incentivized in order to really throw themselves into their work, and that they need to be told what to do. The “best practices” that have been developed on the basis of these premises are, ironically, disincentivizing and disempowering.

A company’s job isn’t to empower people; it’s to remind people that they walk in the door with power and to create the conditions for them to exercise it. Do that, and you will be astonished by the great work they will do for you.