(Laughs) Sorry
We want to thank you for joining us for this special edition the
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Hey it's #1 Best-selling author
and motivational speaker Erik Qualman Most of you know me as Equalman
Thank you for joining us for today's 7 Super Tips. This show is gonna have
Reed Hastings that's right the CEO and founder of Netflix where he's gonna give
us his top 7 Super Tips
You have to be authentic I mean you've got no hope if
you try to pretend to be Reed Hastings or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or
whoever you want to think you're CEOs are that you've met you know that is
crazy and you got to really get comfortable with yourself your strengths
and weaknesses people are inspired by authenticity and I'm just surprised how
many people feel like they're acting and or try to act and you may be a really
quiet person and that's fine but if you have that fierce will that desire for
the institution the company to be great and your own role and that is secondary
and you authentically Express that whatever ways you do then you'll be
greatly accepted okay and so that's all it takes is to be authentic and not try
to be something else and to fundamentally care at your core about
what's good for the company and if everybody knows and you act in the
notion of what's good as best as your judgment can tell what's good for the
company they will see that and people will follow you and they won't be
cynical it's when you hide things it's when you pretend that you lose trust
very quickly
I think the key thing it's a great point
is there many different cultures and as long as you're really clear about your
culture you can get the employees who love that culture and not everyone will
be the same fit there are some things like integrity that are pretty universal
but there are other things of how to deal with dissent where there's you know
perfectly reasonable different ways and effective different ways of dealing with
things and so you know the literature on culture is pretty clear that strong
cultures work and weak cultures are diffused so in a weak culture it's
really a diverse culture you get many people acting very differently and then
they don't understand each other and they feel undercut and political even in
a let's take a Hollywood studio that many of you would not like to work in
they have a very clear system of how to operate in terms of how they manage the
politics and its internally consistent okay and everybody knows it and the
people who get good at it love it and a lot of people don't and that's
just a different it's not inherently awful or ineffective it just wasn't
right safe for us and so that's why I think culture is an expression of what
you and your senior team want to be it's a bit aspirational in that way
You know we've got to have some failures and so we don't really want to have all hits
and literally got the first ones or hits but you know the sign that you're right
at the the edge of chaos the edge of creativity is that some stuff doesn't
work life short I mean you know why are we we're doing this we're like well what
have a difference right now and so it's it's innate it's wanting to to push the
edge to create something that we the people are proud of and that they enjoy
Yeah our basic philosophy is to have the right people and to pay them really well
and through that we've got tremendous loyalty and low turnover and high
commitment to the to the customer yeah and the reason that we publish our
culture deck is so people can figure out before they come to Netflix is this the
right fit for them you know it's probably a little like
Starbucks doesn't seem that hard to make coffee and yet 1:1 coffee chain is
amazing around the world so there's a lot of heart and passion that goes in it
that doesn't come across in the word since the execution it's the people at Netflix
You can't be afraid to change you know you can't let friendship get in
the way of professional judgment so you've always got to be thinking do I
have the right team and I owe it to the whole team to the marketplace to my
investors to myself to do what I think is the right thing for the company and
when I was first to CEO and I had never managed anyone so I'd never written a
review for anyone or anything and because I was a individual engineer and
so I and I found a lot of those communication things difficult and in
particular I couldn't possibly fire someone
it felt so cruel it felt in human and that I just you know it's like breaking
up with a girlfriend or boyfriend or something but worse or you know and so
it felt awful because it was selfish and you know so it took me probably three
years before I came to a view that I had and the rest of the company was
depending on me to do the right thing and that it wasn't about me being
selfish and pushing the person out it was about me protecting the company and
once I could neutralize the value scales that way I could comfortably say to
someone I'm sorry for this but I think it's best for the company if we end your
employment and you know once it was and I think it's best for the company I
could get there now many of you are probably more sophisticated more mature
you've broken up with more partners so it's easier for you but you know because
it just practice right now you know we don't get
enough practice in that
Yeah I think everyone tries to build culture and
values at first you know you have to stage it with a company to the degree
that you're 20 people and you've got no revenue it's sort of a very implicit
culture and you know you spend time on you know things that could kill you like
you know products market fit and that's appropriate and then you know later if
you're going to last then you say okay how do we you know make sure that as new
people come in the culture gets better and one of the big things is probably
this idea that you get better as you get bigger so everyone implicitly has the
idea that you know you start sucking as you get bigger more political harder to
get stuff done and you have to actively fight acceptance of that and come up
with very concrete examples where like Netflix is significantly better in
culture than three and five years ago and then ten years ago and 15 and why is
cuz we got more brains thinking about the problem this is where Malthus really
went wrong so of course mouth is in the late 1700s that everyone's gonna starve
because you look at all the people growth and you look at the fixed
agriculture and he didn't realize that you know basically as the people grew
the ideas to improve agriculture would also improve and so we've had a massive
explosion in agricultural productivity and the ability to feed seven billion
people which he would be shocked by right and it's the same thing in company
culture which is if you have more you know if you have a thousand really
thoughtful people thinking about how to improve you make more progress than if
you've got a hundred and so we are actually getting better as we get bigger
but it's constantly changing the frame of reference that's really what the
leader does you know that this is possible and that effect we should
aspire to it and make it happen
You know put a lot of statistics and analysis and
we've never believed in that we say about data you know use a lot of data
when you're picking stocks but probably don't use a lot of data and picking a
spouse that the more that you're in an emotional element and a gut feel element
the less useful data is and the more you want to really listen to your intuition
and judgment and so we spend a lot of time with candidates trying to get them
to I can feel but then we don't do like how
long did it take analysis or I don't know something like that and then we do
a lot on references I'm always stunned how many companies don't do good
references how many employees that I don't get called about and I'm like
really you didn't even call you know and so we're manic on getting I'm always
blind I mean we never even asked a person for references
That's it for today's 7 Super Tips I'm on campus at University of Texas. Hook em horns!
This is my alma mater for graduate school. If you get a chance come on down to Austin but
most importantly in the meantime make sure you hit that subscribe button to
ensure you get the next 7 Super Tips for the next amazing person we have on the
show and until then remember it's not what we take from the world it is what we leave behind
What? That only be a hundred thousand dollars oh if I get 13
Am I doing the math right there? Equalman Studios they have the utmost respect
for Marvel Studios. You see Mr. Driskill's face every time we have to
talk about Avengers in the office. We're trying to accelerate that unwrapping of
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