Rewarded, Promoted, or Let Go

The line is slide 7 of “Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility”, the deck Reed Hastings posted publicly on SlideShare in 2009, written with Patty McCord, Netflix’s chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012. The two slides before it stage a reveal. Slide 5 observes that many companies have “nice sounding value statements displayed in the lobby” and lists four: Integrity, Communication, Respect, Excellence. Slide 6 reveals whose lobby: Enron, “whose leaders went to jail, and which went bankrupt from fraud”. The slide closes with a parenthetical: “These values were not, however, what was really valued at Enron”.

Slide 8 turns the test into a definition: actual values are “the behaviors and skills that are valued in fellow employees”. Slide 9 commits to it: nine named behaviors (judgment, communication, impact, curiosity, innovation, courage, passion, honesty, selflessness), “meaning we hire and promote people who demonstrate these nine”. The nine slides after that spell each one out as sentences about observable behavior, like Honesty’s “You are quick to admit mistakes”. A noun can hang in any lobby. A sentence like that can be checked against a specific person the next time a promotion comes up.