Stunning Colleagues

The title of chapter 1 of Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer’s 2020 No Rules Rules (Penguin Press). The slogan was introduced over a decade earlier on slide 21 of the 2009 Netflix Culture Deck (Hastings and Patty McCord, Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility), where the slide header reads “Great Workplace is Stunning Colleagues” and the body underneath spells out what it rejects: “Great workplace is not espresso, lush benefits, sushi lunches, grand parties, or nice offices. We do some of these things, but only if they are efficient at attracting and retaining stunning colleagues.”

The slide demotes the usual perks (espresso, benefits, sushi, parties, offices) to budget items, justified only when they bring stunning colleagues into the building.

This pairs with Hastings’s other quote on the site about a team of five stunning employees plus two adequate ones. That one is the staffing side of the same claim: composition is the variable, and everything else follows from it.