In just 20 years, the company has maneuvered through four huge industry shifts impressively well. This has allowed it to grow at unprecedented rates, and a 2018 survey rated it as the best place in Silicon Valley to work. It is a company that emphasises people and innovation and isn’t overly controlling. How did the small company adapt so much better than the rental giant Blockbuster? It all came down to the culture of Netflix. This turned out to be a huge mistake, because as we know, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy just ten years later. The pitch he and his partner made was for Blockbuster to buy Netflix for $50 million and allow Hastings and his partner to run an online video rental service for Blockbuster.

At the time, Netflix was a small start-up, and Blockbuster was a huge company worth $6 billion and 9,000 stores worldwide. Remember going to Blockbuster to rent movies? In 2000, Reed Hastings met with the CEO of Blockbuster to make him an offer. If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.ĭownload PDF Lesson 1: The reason Netflix was able to excel the way it has is its unique company culture.

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Keeping a team talent-dense is hard work, but it allows you to have dispersed decision-making.

The keys to an exceptional company are high talent density, a lot of honesty, and not many useless policies.

Netflix is such a huge success because of its unusual company culture.

Let’s see how much we can discover in just 3 lessons They reveal the controversial ideologies at the company’s center that everyone can learn a thing or two from. Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, teams up with business author Erin Meyer to give us a fascinating look into the exceptionally successful but unconventional business model of Netflix in No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. Netflix owes its success to unprecedented flexibility and radical management principles that were put in place from the very beginning. But to do this, the company had to reinvent itself countless times over the years. Netflix created a revolution in the entertainment industry like never before. The company now even produces its own award-winning movies and television shows and is nothing short of a touchstone of modern culture. When Netflix started 20 years ago as a DVD-by-mail service, no one could have imagined it would become a streaming service with millions of worldwide subscribers.

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