Book Review

“No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention”

Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

This is a book about the culture of Netflix, and how this contributed to its meteoric rise to become one of the leading organisations of the twenty first century.   Significantly, it does not focus upon its innovative range of services that changed the entertainment industry forever – but rather on its equally unconventional approach to recruiting and managing the people who work there.

Netflix has turned many expectations of employment upside down.  Many long-established practices and controls were abandoned in favour of giving employees responsibility and freedom.  This included removing spending controls, working hours, holiday allocations and a host of other measures that are the assumed conditions of large companies.  The aim of all this was to inspire the best, most creative output from the workforce.  Many of these initiatives shock the reader, and the book is frank and honest in its appraisal that not all of them were successful, and others had unintended consequences.  It did, however, result in both spectacular business success and equally impressive employee retention.

This is an interesting story: it will be of interest to readers whom work in schools, many of whom will be familiar with a contrasting style of accountability and micro-management.