Netflix’s 128 Slides on Culture. Awesome.

The blogosphere is lit up with discussion of this 128-slide internal presentation on culture at Netflix, dug up by the Hacking Netflix blog and discussed in this TechCrunch story.

I’m a big believer in the importance of corporate culture as a competitive advantage and often use colorful analogies (e.g., swarming antibodies, Lord of the Flies) to describe one aspect of the culture (mediocrity intolerance) that I want at Mark Logic. Slides 41-51 do a good job of describing what happens as a company grows — and as I witnessed at Business Objects — in this regard.

So while I’m not ready to sign up for everything in the Netflix deck, I think it’s about as visionary and practical a piece on corporate culture as anything I’ve seen. Truly excellent stuff.

2 responses to “Netflix’s 128 Slides on Culture. Awesome.

  1. Daniel Tunkelang

    I like the attitude and a number of the concrete examples that prove they're not just spouting theory without practice. But 128 slides to convey all that? They'd do well to cut to the chase of their concrete examples and compress the explanations. Specifically, they could compress sequences like slides 4-21 and 38-58, and instead focus on the actions that speak louder than words: their comp, vacation, and expense policies.Here's a test for this and any other culture manifesto: what parts of it would 99% of companies have no trouble agreeing with? Cut those parts out; it's the rest that communicates your distinctive culture.

  2. Dominique Rabeuf

    The more neutral a company is, more customers the company should reach. A good company should be driven by the culture knowledge of cultural dependancies. Not so easy for business organizations, but far away for actual capacities of many governmental or not organizations

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