“It was not obvious at the time, even to me, but we had one thing that Blockbuster did not: a culture that valued people over process, emphasized innovation over efficiency, and had very few controls.”
People Over Process
From Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (Penguin Press, 2020). The passage opens Hastings’s account of 2000, the year Netflix offered itself to Blockbuster CEO John Antioco for $50 million and was turned down.
The phrasing has a precedent. The 2001 Agile Manifesto put “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” first. The clause Hastings adds is “innovation over efficiency,” which Agile doesn’t claim.
That second clause is the classic Innovator’s Dilemma trade-off (Clayton Christensen, 1997): a company optimized to win the current market struggles to build the next one, because the new product starts out worse than the established one. Blockbuster’s operational efficiency was real (store density, inventory turnover, late-fee revenue). It just wasn’t the dimension that mattered once DVDs-by-mail and then streaming arrived.