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Culture and values

That which makes us different.

Entertainment, like friendship, is a fundamental human need; it changes how we feel and gives us common ground. We want to entertain the world. If we succeed, there is more laughter, more empathy, and more joy.

To get there, we have an amazing and unusual employee culture.

Like all great companies, we strive to hire the best and we value integrity, excellence, respect, inclusion, and collaboration. What is special about Meccanica Italia, though, is how much we:

  • Encourage independent decision-making by employees.
  • Share information openly, broadly, and deliberately.
  • Are extraordinarily candid with each other.
  • Keep only our highly effective people.
  • Avoid rules.

Our core philosophy is people over process.

More specifically, we have great people working together as a dream team. With this approach, we are a more flexible, fun, stimulating, creative, collaborative and successful organization.

Real Values

The real values of a firm are shown by who gets rewarded or let go. Below are our values, the specific behaviors and skills we care about most.

The more these values sound like you, and describe people you want to work with, the more likely you will thrive at Meccanica Italia.

Judgment

  • You make wise decisions despite ambiguity.
  • You identify root causes, and get beyond treating symptoms.
  • You think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do.
  • You are good at using data to inform your intuition.
  • You make decisions based on the long term, not near term.

Communication

  • You are concise and articulate in speech and writing.
  • You listen well and seek to understand before reacting.
  • You maintain calm poise in stressful situations to draw out the clearest thinking.
  • You adapt your communication style to work well with people from around the world who may not share your native language.
  • You provide candid, helpful, timely feedback to colleagues.

Curiosity

  • You learn rapidly and eagerly.
  • You contribute effectively outside of your specialty.
  • You make connections that others miss.
  • You seek to understand our members around the world, and how we entertain them.
  • You seek alternate perspectives.

Courage

  • You say what you think, when it’s in the best interest of Netflix, even if it is uncomfortable.
  • You make tough decisions without agonizing.
  • You take smart risks and are open to possible failure.
  • You question actions inconsistent with our values.
  • You are able to be vulnerable, in search of truth.

Passion

  • You inspire others with your thirst for excellence.
  • You care intensely about our members and Netflix’s success.
  • You are tenacious and optimistic.
  • You are quietly confident and openly humble.

Selflessness

  • You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group.
  • You are open-minded in search of great ideas.
  • You make time to help colleagues.

Innovation

  • You create new ideas that prove useful.
  • You re-conceptualize issues to discover solutions to hard problems.
  • You challenge prevailing assumptions, and suggest better approaches.
  • You keep us nimble by minimizing complexity and finding time to simplify.
  • You thrive on change.

Inclusion

  • You collaborate effectively with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures.
  • You nurture and embrace differing perspectives to make better decisions.
  • You recognize we all have biases, and work to grow past them.
  • You intervene if someone else is being marginalized.
  • You are curious about how our different backgrounds affect us at work, rather than pretending they don’t affect us.

Integrity

  • You are known for candor, authenticity, transparency, and being non-political.
  • You only say things about fellow employees that you say to their face.
  • You admit mistakes freely and openly.
  • You treat people with respect regardless of their status or disagreement with you.
  • You always share relevant information, even when worrisome to do so.

Impact

  • You accomplish amazing amounts of important work.
  • You demonstrate consistently strong performance so colleagues can rely upon you.
  • You make your colleagues better.
  • You focus on results over process.

A dream team is one in which all of your colleagues are extraordinary at what they do and are highly effective collaborators.

The value and satisfaction of being on a dream team is tremendous. For us, it is not sushi launches gyms, elegant offices or frequent parties that make a workplace great.

Our version of the great workplace is a dream team in pursuit of ambitious common goals, for which we spend heavily.

It is on such a team that you learn the most, perform your best work, improve the fastest, and have the most fun.

Our goal is to inspire people more than manage them. We trust our teams to do what they think is best for Meccanica Italia.

We give them lots of freedom, power, and information in support of their decisions. In turn, this generates a sense of responsibility and self-discipline that drives us to do great work that benefits the company.

We believe that people thrive on being trusted, on freedom, and on being able to make a difference. So, we foster freedom and empowerment wherever we can.

For every significant decision there is a responsible captain of the ship who makes a judgment call after sharing and digesting others’ views. We avoid committees making decisions because that would slow us down, and diffuse responsibility.

We farm for dissent; dissent is not natural or easy, which is why we make a concerted effort to stimulate it. Many times, groups will meet about topics and debate them, but then afterwards someone needs to make a decision.  Small decisions may be shared just by email, larger ones will merit a memo with discussion of the various positions, and why the captain made such a decision.

The bigger a decision, the more extensive the dissent/assent gathering should be, usually in an open shared document. We are clear, however, that decisions are not made by a majority or committee vote.

We don’t wait for consensus, nor do we drive to rapid, uninformed decision making. When the captain of any particular decision is reasonably confident of the right bet for us to take, they decide and we take that bet.

Afterwards, as the impact becomes clearer, we reflect on the decision, and see if we could do even better in the future.

If you disagree on a material issue, it is your responsibility to explain why you disagree, ideally in both discussion and in writing. The back and forth of discussion can clarify the different views, and concise writing of the core issues helps people reflect on what is the wise course, as well as making it easy to share your views widely.

The informed captain on that decision has the responsibility to welcome, understand, and consider your opinions, but may not agree. Once the captain makes a decision, we expect everyone to help make it as successful as possible.

Later, if significant new information becomes available, it is fine to ask the captain to revisit the topic. Silent disagreement is unacceptable and unproductive.

We want employees to be great independent decision makers, and to only consult their manager when they are unsure of the right decision.

The leader’s job at every level is to set clear context so that others have the right information to make generally great decisions.

As companies grow, they often become highly centralized and inflexible. We avoid this by being highly aligned and loosely coupled. We spend lots of time debating strategy together, and then trust each other to execute on tactics without prior approvals.

Often, two groups working on the same goals won’t know of, or have approval over, their peer activities.  If, later, the activities don’t seem right, we have a candid discussion.

We may find that the strategy was too vague or the tactics were not aligned with the agreed strategy. And we discuss generally how we can do better in the future.

The success of a “Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled” work environment is dependent upon the collaborative efforts of high performance individuals and effective context. Ultimately, the end goal is to grow the business for bigger impact while increasing flexibility and agility. We seek to be big, fast and nimble.

New employees often comment in their first few months that they are surprised at how accurate this culture description is to the actual culture they experience. Around the world, we live and create our culture together.

In fact, hundreds of our global employees contributed to this document. We do not seek to preserve our culture — we seek to improve it. Every person who joins us helps to shape and evolve the culture further. We find new ways to accomplish more together.

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