Silicon Valley's most important document gets an update

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Hey everyone,

Netflix has just updated their famous ‘Culture Memo’ for the first time in 15 years. We talk about culture all the time around the virtual water cooler at Vivace — how to build our own culture, lessons from other companies like Netflix, and embedded in the work we’re doing with our clients. In a moment of synchronicity, we’re currently leading one of our clients through some values development work which has been a real joy.

We thought it’d be timely to review Netflix’s renowned organizational culture code and its impact. Stick around to the end for some recommendations to pop in your queue from the team.

-joel

Op-Ed by Mimi Hayton

Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility was originally written in 2009, the same year its streams overtook DVD shipments and the stock price closed out at USD$7.87 a share (up 86.6% for the year). Today’s stock price: USD$631.37 (StatMuse).

‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’, as Peter Drucker’s famous quote goes, and perhaps few tech companies have proved this better than Netflix which is currently the only profitable major streaming service in the US (YahooFinance). On the quality front, it’s the second most awarded streamer after HBO, with 134 Primetime Emmy Awards (and in fairness HBO had a bit of a head start).

Developed by Reed Hastings (Netflix’s former CEO) and Patty McCord (its former chief talent officer), the 125 slide deck became a seminal touchstone for not just for organisational culture, but HR more broadly, influencing leading companies globally then and ever since – including Zappos, Hubspot, Facebook, Spotify, Hootsuite, and others (Fast Company).