年初从《奈飞文化手册》读到这本《No Rules Rules》（中文名《不拘一格》），像是先对着一套成熟的deck梳理一遍框架，再一一查看其背后的因由解析，全程就是一边共鸣、一边羡慕来着。
网飞的这套文化在我看来是将美国对“自由”的倡导发扬到了无边无界的极致，但仔细看起内里，实则严谨地环环相扣，想环环做到，则十分不易，一环不扣，甚至可能满盘皆输。
我的粗糙总结：
人：只招和留top performers, 只是adequate都不行
环境：公司里建立坦诚文化，从上至下都能看到公司发展的全貌，信息不刻意保密
人+环境：最后，给最优的人以最大的决策权，大幅提高创新效率
网飞的一切政策实际上都是在为上面这条通路开道。外人说起网飞的文化，喜欢谈论无限假期差旅、市场最高薪水，或是坦率到吓人的candor文化、能够无情开掉80分的员工，但这些都不过是网飞一套“自由组合拳”后顺理成章的结果，或是因为这几条与每个人都显得相关，所以更容易出圈些。
Some items squash innovation. Vacation policies, travel policies and expense policies can lead to the type of high-rule environment that discourage creative thinking and scare off the most innovative employees.
Other items slow the business down. Approval policies, decision making by committee, and contract sign-offs all put hurdles in from our your employees so that they can't move quickly.
Many of these items keep the organization from changing quickly when the environment shifts...
If your goal is to build a more inventive, fast, and flexible organization, develop a culture of freedom and responsibility by establishing the necessary conditions so you can remove these rules and processes too.
但比起这些，我可能更羡慕他们内部倡导的lead with context而不是control，更喜欢同事们在提前说明底线（alignment）之后创造或等待创造的过程。
我曾在一些小项目中试图开展这一想法，避开现领导喜欢的保姆式brief，只谈几个原则和底线，就放手让其他人去做。偶然几次确实得到过惊喜的意外答案，但在我乐在其中时，还是常常因为这不是最高效的执行方式，而遭到批评。
要我保姆式brief固然也是可以的，那甚至某种程度上比提前说明底线的alignment方式更直白也更容易，但大概我在工作中隐隐还是有些不愿卸下的包袱，或者我更愿称之为调皮的自我，虽然常常被打击，从结果看也总是走老路，但几乎就是皮一次开心一次:) 而无论是非要我去control还是我自己被totally controlled，都难免压抑。
No Rules Rules一书在倒数第二章一定程度上治愈了我，即是书里好心地指出了不同模式各有优劣：
If your focus is on eliminating mistakes, then control is the best. ExxonMobil is in a safety-critical market. Its sites need hundreds of safety procedures to minimize the risk of people getting hurt. Control mechanisms are a necessity when you're truing to run a dangerous operation profitably with as few accidents as possible.
But if , like Target, your goal is innovation, making a mistake is not the primary risk. The big risk is becoming irrelevant because your employees aren't coming up with great ideas to reinvent the business.
对于我们公司这样身处技术性行业，讲究精确和精准，这几句话一定程度上可以作为为何我们的内部文化会形成至此的注解。
只不过，虽然在这一严谨的行业，却身处一定程度上需要一些“天马行空”“灵光乍现”的moment才能把活干得更好更漂亮更极致的岗位，多多少少，还是希望能给自己觅得一点空间啊。
如何能在未来工作中保留自己的一点点小想法可能是我下一步想探索的，我终究不愿成为扫完门前雪就拉倒的螺丝钉:)
以下为No Rules Rules书摘：
1. A Great Workplace Is Stunning Colleagues
We were in cost-cutting mode, and we'd just let go of a third of the workforce, yet the office was suddenly buzzing with passion, energy, and idea.
For top performers, a great workplace isn't about a lavish office, a beautiful gym, or a free sushi lunch. It's about the joy of being surrounded by people who are both talented and collaborative. People who can help you better.
Performance -- both good and bad -- is infectious.
2. Say What You Really Think
Despite the blissful benefits of praise, by a roughly three-to-one margin, people believe corrective feedback does more to improve their performance than positive feedback.
To foster an atmosphere of candor requires getting your employees to abandon years of conditioning an firmly held beliefs such as "Only give feedback when someone asks you for it" and "Praise in public, criticize in private".
When considering whether to give feedback, people often feel torn between two competing issues: they don't want to hurt the recipient's feelings, yet they want to help that person succeed. The goal at Netflix is to help each other succeed, even if that means feelings occasionally get hurt. More important, we've found that it the right environment, with the right approach, we can give the feedback without hurting feelings.
The first technique our managers use to get their employees to give them honest feedback is regularly putting feedback on the agenda of their one-on-one meetings with their staff.
You must show the employee that it's safe to give feedback by responding to all criticism with gratitude and, above all, by providing "belonging cues".
A belonging cue might be a small gesture, like using an appreciative tone of voice, moving physically closer to the speaker, or looking positively into that person's eyes. Or it might be larger, like thanking that person for their courage and speaking about that courage in front of the larger team.
A culture of candor does not mean that you can speak your mind without concern for how it will impact others. On the contrary, it requires that everyone think carefully about the 4A guidelines.
4A:
Aim to assist
Actionable
Appreciate
Accept or discard
3a. Remove Vacation Policy
Time off provides mental bandwidth that allows you to think creatively and see your work in a different light. If you are working all the time, you don't have the perspective to see your problem with fresh eyes.
Most important, the freedom signals to employees that we trust them to do the right thing, which is turn encourages them to behave responsibly.
Freedom is not the opposite of accountability, as I'd previously considered. Instead, it is a path toward it.
3b. Remove Travel and Expense Approvals
If Viacom told employees, "Order one starter, one main course, and one bottle of wine for two people," they might order caviar, lobster, and a bottle of champagne. That's within the rules but very expensive. When you tell people to behave in the company's best interest, they order Caesar salads, chicken breasts, and a couple of beers. The organization with the policy is not necessarily the one saving money.
4. Pay Top of Personal Market
Big salaries, not merit bonuses, are good for innovation.
5. Open the Books
My goal was to make employees feel like owners and , in turn, to increase the amount of responsibility they took for the company's success.
However, opening company secrets to employees had another outcome: it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.
Do not punish the majority for the poor behavior of a few.
Whisper wins and shout the mistakes.
Vulnerability is courage in you and inadequacy in me.
6. No Decision-Making Approvals Needed
At most organizations, no matter how much autonomy is given to employees to set their own objective s and develop their own ideas, nearly everybody agrees that it's the boss's job to make sure his team doesn't make stupid decisions that waste money and resources. And if you happen to be the boss, Reed's mantra," Don't seek to please the boss," can be not just odd but downright frightening.
Our mantra is that employees don't need the boss's approval to move forward (but they should let the boss know what's going on). If sheila comes to you with a proposal you think is going to fail, you need to remind yourself why Sheila is working for you and why you paid top of the market to get her.
Ask yourself these four questions:
Is Sheila a stunning employee?
Do you believe she has good judgment?
Do you think she has the ability to make a positive impact?
Is she good enough to be on your team?
If you answer NO to any of these questions, you should get rid of her. But if your answer is yes, step aside and let her decide for herself.
When you read about Freedom and Responsibility at Netflix, it's easy to get lost in the lovely idea of Freedom without properly considering the accompanying weight of Responsibility. Being the informed captain and signing off your own contracts is case in point.
7. The Keeper Test
IF A PERSON ON YOUR TEAM WERE TO QUIT TOMORROW, WOULD YOU TRY TO CHANGE THEIR MIND? OR WOULD YOU ACCEPT THEIR RESIGNATION, PERHAPS WITH A LITTLE RELIEF? IF THE LATTER, YOU SHOULD GIVE THEM A SEVERANCE PACKAGE NOW, AND LOOK FOR A STAR, SOMEONE YOU WOULD FIGHT TO KEEP.
We encourage our managers to apply the Keeper Test regularly. But we are very careful to not have any firing quotas or ranking system. Rank-and-yank or "you must let go of X percent of your people" is just the type of rule-based process that we try to avoid. More important, these methods get managers to let go of mediocre employees, but they kill team work at the same time. I want our high-performing employees to compete against rank-and-yank what you gain in talent density you lose in reduced collaboration.
We don't have limits on how many people we play with. One employee doesn't have to lose for the other to win. On the contrary, the more excellence we have on the team, the more we accomplish. The more we accomplish, the more we grow. The more we grow, the more positions we add to our roster. The more positions we add, the more space there is for high-performing talent.
8. A Circle of Feedback
We used a "Start, Stop, Continue" format for the comments to ensure that people didn't just pat each other on the back but gave concrete, actionable feedback.
9. Lead with Context, Not Control
If your employees are struggling, you'll need to monitor and check their work to ensure they are making the right decisions. If you've got a group of high performers, they'll most likely crave freedom and thrive if you lead with context.
If your focus is on eliminating mistakes, then control is the best. ExxonMobil is in a safety-critical market. Its sites need hundreds of safety procedures to minimize the risk of people getting hurt. Control mechanisms are a necessity when you're truing to run a dangerous operation profitably with as few accidents as possible.
But if , like Target, your goal is innovation, making a mistake is not the primary risk. The big risk is becoming irrelevant because your employees aren't coming up with great ideas to reinvent the business.
If you've got high-performing employees, leading with context is best. To encourage original thinking, don't tell your employees what to do and make them check boxes. Give them the context to dream big, the inspiration to think differently, and the space to make mistakes along the way. In other words, lead with context.
If you are managing a department in a tightly coupled system and you decide you'd like to begin to lead your people with context, you may find that the tight coupling gets in your way. Since all the important decisions get made at the top, you might wish to give your employees decision-making power, but you can't, because anything important has to be approved not just by you but by your boss and by her boss.
We don't need to be aligned on how each department is going to get where they are going -- that we leave to the individual areas -- but we do need to make sure we are all moving in the same direction.
WHEN ONE OF YOUR PEOPLE DOES SOMETHING DUMB DON'T BLAME THEM.
INSTEAD ASK YOURSELF WHAT COTEXT YOU FAILED TO SET. ARE YOU ARTICULATE AND INSPIRING ENOUGH IN EXPRESSING YOUR GOALS AND STRATEGY? HAVE YOU CLEARLY EXPLAINED ALL THE ASSUMPTIONS AND RISKS THAT WILL HELP YOUR TEAM TO MAKE GOOD DECISIONS?ARE YOU AND YOUR EMPLOYEES HIGHLY ALIGNED ON VISION AND OBJECTIVES?
Some items squash innovation. Vacation policies, travel policies and expense policies can lead to the type of high-rule environment that discourage creative thinking and scare off the most innovative employees.
Other items slow the business down. Approval policies, decision making by committee, and contract sign-offs all put hurdles in from our your employees so that they can't move quickly.
Many of these items keep the organization from changing quickly when the environment shifts...
If your goal is to build a more inventive, fast, and flexible organization, develop a culture of freedom and responsibility by establishing the necessary conditions so you can remove these rules and processes too.
Conclusion
The rules-and-process approach has been the primary way of coordinating group behavior for centuries. But it isn't the only way, and it isn't only Netflix using a different method.
For those of you who are operating in the creative economy, where innovation, speed, and flexibility are the keys to success, consider throwing out the orchestra and focusing instead on making a different kind of music.
网友评论