No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
“TWiST Book Club pick, chosen by Jason.”
Why it is worth your time
No Rules Rules is a 2020 book by Reed Hastings, co-founder and then chief executive of Netflix, and Erin Meyer, a professor at INSEAD who wrote The Culture Map. It sets out the company's culture: hire for talent density, pay top of market, say what you think to people's faces, remove approval processes and expense policies, and use the keeper test, in which managers ask whether they would fight to keep each employee. Jason chose it as his TWiST book club pick for November 2020, when the hosts were debating how companies should run with everyone remote. Netflix's culture deck has been a reference in startups for years, and this is the long version. It suits founders deciding what to copy. The caveat is that it is a company's own account of itself. Andrew Hill of the Financial Times noted 'a certain amount' of executive self-promotion and called the model hard to copy.
