Rethinking Netflix’s Superstar Culture - an economic perspective
I had a pleasure to work with and got to know some of the companies in my network that manifests that they follow the Netflix’s “superstar culture” (a.k.a Netflix Culture — Seeking Excellence), where “We’re not a professional sport team, not a family” stood as a daily mantra from high-level executives.
👉 The premise is “If a company prioritizes hiring exceptionally talented individuals, they can achieve extraordinary results and outperform their competitors.”
Although the culture is well known and serves as a great culture foundation for a company (especially for startups), but in practice it seems like it is not implemented correctly, that hurt employee’s morale and efficiency.In this post, I will:
- Share my observation of pitfalls of understanding and executing of the “superstar culture” from some the company I knew
- Attempt to craft a much simpler and more general mental model for finding, evaluating, and thinking about hiring superstars.
🙌 Disclaimer: In this post, I’m not specifically criticize the Netflix culture (although I did see some down sides of the culture), what I want to clarify is the meaning and implication of the culture, and how we should execute that in a solid manner - if we really want to replicate such culture in our businesses or startups.
This post serves as my personal opinion towards the execution of netflix’s culture, logic loop hole might be possible and important information might be missed out, so it’s open to receive critics. Please feel free to give feedbacks if you have any!
The pitfalls of superstars culture
Working in the “superstar team” culture does bring a lot of benefits and enjoyment, we’ve got to produce incredible results with high productivity, and at the same time satisfy life fulfillment through meaningful work.
But if a company was so talent-focused, which sounds pretty awesome, in what way could it be so wrong?
What really bothers me is that there are inconsistencies and unfairness in the way the company executes the Superstar Culture - specifically in finding and evaluating talents, which is mainly based on personal judgement of the executive (of what they think is true for the Netflix’s culture).
This is not to say gut-judgement is bad, it can be strengthen via exposure and experience (I do make gut-judgement from time to time) - However, I still insist that it could be much more systematically defined, in terms of superstars Evaluation and Allocation .
