Kultur der Freiheit und Verantwortung

Regeln im Leben sind Krücken für kreativ Lahme. Diese Aussage hat mich ein Leben lang begleitet und sie stimmt. Stück für Stück ändert sich die Welt und wer zu sehr an Bisherigem festhält, ist bald verlassen. Ich habe das in meiner eigenen Berufswelt erlebt und kann sagen, dass im Bereich der Fotografie kein Stein auf dem anderen blieb. Wurden in den 90ern noch Bilder primär offline verkauft und angeboten, oft noch individuell beauftragt, meist von Profis ausgeführt, den Licht- und Blendenkönnern, ist heute jedes Sujet mit ein, zwei Klicks online verfügbar. Angeboten werden sie von einer wachsenden Zahl von Menschen, die ebenso wie sie etwas erblicken dies in der gleichen Sekunde problemlos fotografieren können. Dabei wandern die Bilder sofort von der Kamera auf eine Angebotsplattform im Netz. Geschuldet alles einer Foto-Technologie, die Quantensprünge hinter sich hat. Aufwendige Retuschen werden heute ultraschnell direkt in der Kamera erledigt. Denken, auslösen, hochladen, teilen - eine Sache von Sekunden.

Vor kurzem erst stieß ich auf Netflix und habe ein Probeabo abgeschlossen. Hintergrund war die Beschäftigung mit einem Unglück in Paris, dem Brand im Bazar de la Charité am 4. Mai 1897, bei dem weit über 100 Menschen den Tod fanden. Netflix hatte eine Serie daraus gemacht, sehr gut und aufwendig inszeniert. Trotzdem blieb ich nicht bei Netflix, weil ich lieber Bücher lese und Tv/Kino/Film bei mir eher ein Nischendasein führt. Die Beschäftigung mit der Unternehmensentwicklung in diesem Buch allerdings ist spannend und lehrreich. Wie kann ein DVD-Verleih zum großen Unterhaltungs- und Filmgiganten mutieren?
Gleich am Anfang dieser Satz des Gründers: „Unsere Kultur war darauf angelegt, mit einer hohen Talentdichte Spitzenleistungen zu erzielen und die Mitarbeiter nicht zu kontrollieren und zu lenken, sondern ihnen einen Kontext zu bieten, an dem sie sich orientieren konnten, um eigenständig zu entscheiden.“ Hört sich an wie des kreativen Unternehmers Traum! Hier gelten keine Regeln. Na ja, nicht die alten Regeln von alten Riesen wie Enron etc., aber schon eigene, andere, ungewöhnlichere.

Vier Punkte der Umwälzung waren entscheidend:
Der Übergang vom DVD Verleih zum Online-Streaming
Der Übergang alter Inhalte zu Produzierten, von Dritten
Eigene Filmstudios
Von USA in die Welt

Wer nicht den Willen zur kreativen Topleistungen hat, wird sofort entlassen, mit einer sehr hohen Abfindung, absolute Ehrlichkeit und Kritikfähigkeit stehen im Mittelpunkt. Kann das funktionieren? Es hat! Wie das Ganze strukturiert ist und implementiert werden kann, vermittelt dieses Buch sehr gut, ein wirklich spannender Reader. Führung durch Kontext, nicht durch Kontrolle, so könnte man es umschreiben, das Ergebnis: eine Kultur der Freiheit und Verantwortung. Aber auch extreme Talent- und Erfolgsorientierung. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich primär Innovation und Flexibilität statt Fehlervermeidung und Weiter so. Keine zu langfristige Planung, sondern schnelles Reagieren auf sich immer schneller ändernde Gegebenheiten und Gelegenheiten.

Ich frage mich nur, wer wird in ferner Zukunft Netflix alt aussehen lassen? Noch fehlt mir die Phantasie, aber es wird so kommen. Tatsächlich ist Netflix ein Unternehmer-Unternehmen mit höchstem Wettbewerb, wer dort arbeitet, kann keine ruhige Kugel schieben, er ist permanent in einem Entscheidungs-Tsunami mit erschreckend hohen Gewinnmöglichkeiten. Im Grunde ist es heute Hollywood, alle denkbaren Filmstudios weltweit, ein wachsender Grund für höchste Einkommen.

Wichtig ist, wie mir Netflix als Ex-Abonnenten begegnet. Immerhin eins haben sie begriffen. Sie duzen mich nicht. Das ist heute schon viel und führt dazu, dass ich das Mail lese. Sie haben aber keinerlei Ahnung, was mich wirklich interessiert, jenseits von gedachten Drehbüchern ist es etwas ganz anderes, dafür brauchen sie noch etwas hastige Schnelldreherei. Vermutlich aber werden sie es bald entdecken.

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culture of freedom and responsibility

Rules in life are crutches for the creatively lame. This statement has accompanied me throughout my life and it is true. Bit by bit the world is changing and those who cling too much to the past will soon be abandoned. I have experienced this in my own professional world and I can say that no stone was left unturned in the field of photography. While in the 90s pictures were primarily sold and offered offline, often commissioned individually and mostly carried out by professionals, the light and aperture experts, today every subject is available online with one or two clicks. They are offered by a growing number of people who, just as they see something, can easily photograph it in the same second. The images are immediately transferred from the camera to an online service platform. All due to photo technology that has made quantum leaps. Elaborate retouching can now be done extremely quickly directly in the camera. Think, trigger, upload, share - a matter of seconds.

I recently came across Netflix and signed up for a trial subscription. The background was the occupation with an accident in Paris, the fire in the Bazar de la Charité on May 4, 1897, in which well over 100 people died. Netflix had made a series out of it, very well and elaborately staged. Nevertheless, I didn't stay with Netflix because I prefer to read books and TV/cinema/film is more of a niche existence for me. However, dealing with corporate development in this book is exciting and instructive. How can a DVD rental company mutate into a major entertainment and film giant?
Right at the beginning this sentence from the founder: “Our culture was designed to achieve top performance with a high density of talent and not to control and direct the employees, but to offer them a context that they could use as orientation in order to make independent decisions .” Sounds like a creative entrepreneur's dream! There are no rules here. Well, not the old rules of old giants like Enron etc., but their own, different, more unusual ones.

Four points of the upheaval were crucial:
The transition from DVD rentals to online streaming
The transition from legacy content to produced, by third parties
Own film studios
From USA to the world

Anyone who does not have the will to achieve top creative performance is dismissed immediately, with a very high severance payment, and the focus is on absolute honesty and the ability to accept criticism. Can this work? It has! How the whole thing is structured and can be implemented is conveyed very well by this book, a really exciting reader. Leadership through context, not through control, as you could put it, the result: a culture of freedom and responsibility. But also extreme talent and success orientation. The result shows primarily innovation and flexibility instead of error avoidance and keep it up. No long-term planning, but quick reactions to ever more rapidly changing circumstances and opportunities.

I'm just wondering who's going to make Netflix look old in the distant future? I still don't have the imagination, but it will happen that way. In fact, Netflix is an entrepreneurial company with the highest level of competition. Those who work there cannot take it easy, they are constantly in a tsunami of decisions with alarmingly high profit opportunities. Basically, today it is Hollywood, all conceivable film studios worldwide, a growing reason for the highest incomes.

The important thing is how I meet Netflix as an ex-subscriber. At least they understood one thing. You don't call me first. That's a lot today and I'm reading the mail. But they have no idea what really interests me, it's something completely different beyond imaginary screenplays, for that they still need a bit of hasty fast-moving. But they will probably discover it soon.

A very different approach to run an effective business from the Netflix team.

It's certainly a thought provoking read and there are many strategies that could be adopted by a number of businesses. However, some are clearly rooted in American business culture and legal framework where employees have fewer rights than in Europe and the UK.

I would still recommend this book, it just needs to be read with local regulations firmly in mind. ( )

A must-read for managers and founders who want to see the other extreme of transparency and pushing down decision making; how it works at Netflix. Hard to imagine it working out as well in a less successful company but still a very interesting case study. ( )

Reed Hastings brought in a culture of high performance and great candor at NetFlix. This book details the journey across two decades of building NetFlix as a global multinational by creating its own unique culture. Authors detail out the key organisational behaviours that made NetFlix a high throughput organisation. Well written with three perspectives presented throughout the book, Reed’s, outsider perspective by Erin and of employees. ( )

Before reading this book, you should read Carol Sanford's "No More Feedback."

Before getting into the book review, I'll ask a question on epistemology: how do we choose a management theory? Just like dieting, there are books that well tell us just about anything about management theory: give lots of feedback; don't give any feedback; pay your employees well; pay your employees cheaply.

You might respond: "I'll do what works. Show me the data." But this is a cop out—different approaches have different micro results based on their contexts. On the other hand, practices eventually influence the noosphere, and shift the cosmology of an industry or domain. In other words, whatever management theory you implement will influence your domain—not just through its results, but also through the assumptions it makes about human nature.

Now to move into the book review:

The book is structured in a four-tiered spiral. Each cycle moves through these steps: increase talent density, increase candor, remove controls.

Now to come back to a contrast with Sanford's work—the fundamental question in both books is whether or not humans can develop, and how?

To oversimplify:

Hastings and Meyer assume a behavioral approach—people are a product of the expectations placed on them, and there's only so much we can do to work with an individual's potential. Most people aren't exceptional, so we need to put in place gated strategies that weed out the bottom nine tenths of the bell curve.

Sanford assumes a regenerative paradigm: each person, and each company, have an essence, and the capacity of both in manifesting the potential of that essence is limitless. Her basic framework aims to further internal agency, external considering, and an internal locus of control.

Hastings and Meyer's title heralds a work culture of freedom and responsibility. And yet are you really free if you're part of a team where you get fired for one improper expense, or one innovative quarter? On control spectrum, Hastings and Meyer seem to be claiming that they've moved away from control, but they've simply traded hard control (traditional hierarchies) for soft control (be creative—but if we don't like your work, we can fire you at any time). Sanford's approach, on the other hand, moves beyond both hard and soft control into something entirely different.

Is Netflix's approach comprehensible and something that can be implemented without a lot of creativity? Yes. Is it revolutionary? No. ( )