Upstanding

CHAPTER 6Make Character-LedCulture Your Strategy

“Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.”

—Doris Kearns Goodwin

It requires a lot of courage to take a stand on behalf of a company's character.

In July 2020, Netflix became the largest entertainment/media company by market cap—less than 25 years after its founding—outpacing long-established industry giants such as Walt Disney Company and Comcast.¹ To say that Netflix's growth “has been rapid” would be perhaps one of the great understatements of the century. And, as you can imagine, all this growth put tremendous strain on the organization and the people who worked in it.

Instrumental to Netflix's success, despite all the obstacles and existential threats it encountered along the way, is a culture that is the foundation of its strategy. This culture-as-strategy determines the decisions its people make, what the company values, performance expectations, promotions and career development, the degree of freedom and responsibility employees enjoy, who gets hired and fired, the investments the company makes, the chances it takes, and much more.

Netflix's unique culture didn't just happen—it is the result of some very intentional choices made by cofounder Reed Hastings and others in the organization, with updates along the way as the company continued to grow and evolve.

In his book No Rules Rules, Hastings (with coauthor Erin Meyer) ...