Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Netflix culture and values

Here's an interesting internal presentation from Netflix on their company culture and values.

Among other things, the presentation argues that in order to preserve a high level of freedom as the organization transitions from start up mode to large organization mode, the organization will actually hire more and more star performers. In other words, you maintain freedom by hiring more responsible people who are good performers. I don't see how that is practical. A ten employee company can easily hire 2-3 stars and increase head count by 20-30%. However, a 1000 employee company would need to find 200-300 stars in the market place in order to maintain its star ratio as it were. This seems quite hard to do.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

New Look

Testing a brand new visual identity and template for Management by Matrices.

The role of strategy in firms

My latest column for The Hindu Business Line explores the role of strategy in firms . Full text follows -- While there are many defini...