If you build an organization made up of high performers, you can eliminate most controls. The denser the talent, the greater the freedom you can offer.

In order to fortify the talent density in your workforce, for all creative roles hire one exceptional employee instead of ten or more average ones. Hire this amazing person at the top of whatever range they are worth on the market. Adjust their salary at least annually in order to continue to offer them more than competitors would. If you can’t afford to pay your best employees top of market, then let go of some of the less fabulous people in order to do so. That way, the talent will become even denser.

With our dispersed decision-making model, if you pick the very best people and they pick the very best people (and so on down the line) great things will happen. Ted calls this the “hierarchy of picking” and it’s what a workforce built on high talent density is all about.

To achieve the highest level of talent density you have to be prepared to make tough calls. If you’re serious about talent density, you have to get in the habit of doing something a lot harder: firing a good employee when you think you can get a great one.

One of the reasons this is so difficult in many companies is because business leaders are continually telling their employees, “We are a family.” But a high-talent-density work environment is not a family.

A professional sports team is a good metaphor for high talent density because athletes on professional teams:

• Demand excellence, counting on the manager to make sure every position is filled by the best person at any given time.

• Train to win, expecting to receive candid and continuous feedback about how to up their game from the coach and from one another.

• Know effort isn’t enough, recognizing that, if they put in a B performance despite an A for effort, they will be thanked and respectfully swapped out for another player.

On a high-performing team, collaboration and trust work well because all the members are exceptionally skilled both at what they do and at working well with others. For an individual to be deemed excellent she can’t just be amazing at the game; she has to be selfless and put the team before her own ego. She has to know when to pass the ball, how to help her teammates thrive, and recognize that the only way to win is for the team to win together. This is exactly the type of culture we were going for at Netflix. This is when we started saying that at Netflix: WE ARE A TEAM, NOT A FAMILY.