Reed Hasting's Top 5 Lessons Learned Being CEO of Netflix

I'm Reed Hastings, CEO at Netflix, and here are five lessons I've learned over the last 20 years of Netflix. The first lesson is no rules rules. We don't have a vacation policy. You take whatever you want. We don't have an expense policy. You spend as you think appropriate. We have only one five-word principle, which is to act in Netflix's best interest. And with that, we find that employees do amazing things. Lesson number two is that a global company needs a global culture. It's been so exciting for Netflix over the last few years to expand around the world. Now we understand much more how different nations like to give feedback, and it's been very stimulating for everyone at Netflix to be inclusive of all of these different values so that we can work well together to serve our members around the world. A successful culture is one where people can disagree openly and move forward with candor. One of the big mistakes that I made about eight years ago at Netflix was Quickstart, where we separated the DVD and streaming services too quickly. And what I found is that our employees did not feel comfortable telling me that this was a bad idea. Afterwards, we realized it was a bad idea. So we changed our culture to really focus on farming for dissent. It's each leader's responsibility to stimulate people to really say what they think might be wrong. For all of our leaders, including me as CEO, our job is to inspire, not to manage. If you've got high-performing employees, you can broadly set context and focus on inspiration to stimulate the best creativity amongst people to create great ideas that help your company move forward. And the last lesson is to open the books, share information broadly inside the company so people have the information they need to make great decisions for the company. And it's all about freedom and inspiring people to serve our customers.