The best way to share and embed cultural DNA is person to person. When you’re growing fast, the new people you just hired most likely have some responsibility to hire as well, so a week of orientation isn’t going to cut it.

If you have fifty people who understand your culture and add a hundred who don’t, you will lose that culture. It’s just math.

So when bringing in new employees—especially execs—you shouldn’t just throw them in the deep end, hand them a branded company notebook, and think you’re done. The first month or two are crucial and should be a period of positive micromanagement. Don’t worry about getting too in the weeds or not giving them enough freedom. Not at first. A brand-new person needs all the help they can get to become really well integrated. Explain how you do things in detail so they don’t make mistakes and alienate the rest of the team right off the bat. Talk to them about what’s working and what isn’t, what you would do in their position, what’s encouraged and what’s verboten, who to ask for help and who to treat with kid gloves.

That’s the best way to immerse someone in the culture, style, and processes of a team. Give them the push they need to start running with the pack rather than leaving them standing on the starting line, reading some docs, hoping they’ll catch up.

Always remember that it’s scary joining a new team. Not knowing anyone. Not knowing if you’ll fit in. Not knowing if you’ll succeed.

That’s why I started doing brown-bag lunches with the CEO. Matt did them too. Every two to four weeks, we’d gather a crew of 15–25 new hires and existing employees and have an informal lunch. We tried to cross-pollinate different people from different groups, a good mix from around the company. No managers, no executives, no keynote presentations. Just an

opportunity for them to get to know the bogeyman at the top and for me to get to know them. They asked me about our products, our policies, about me and Matt and our history at Apple. About why we didn’t allow massages, about why we had so many code names. [See also: Chapter 6.4: Fuck Massages.] And I asked about what they were excited about, what they were working on, why they joined.

It was my chance to highlight why their role was important, to talk about how their team’s goals powered our company goals, about our culture and our products and new projects and what was going right and what wasn’t. New employees had the chance to come directly to me with their questions as well as meet existing employees who were already steeped in our culture, who could help them and lead by example.

Any employee could come to five lunches a year. And each lunch was a cultural inoculation, a vaccine against indifference and apathy, against thinking that what you do doesn’t matter and that nobody at the top knows who you are.

If a company-wide meeting attended by five hundred employees isn’t engaging or memorable, then the company will have wasted five hundred people-hours—ten thousand dollars if you assume a twenty-dollar-per-person hourly wage. Spending even five hours of five people’s time (five hundred dollars total) to prepare for that meeting is undoubtedly worth it. Even one recurring weekly meeting with a handful of attendees can translate to thousands of dollars of wasted productivity over the course of a year if that time together isn’t well spent.

After the meeting, the follow-ups need to be treated with as much care as the preparation. A single meeting is not an end unto itself; it is a stepping-stone in the much longer path of creating something valuable for the world. In the last few minutes of a meeting, get into the habit of asking, “So before we break, let’s make sure we agree on next steps . . .” After the meeting, send out a recap to the attendees with a summary of the discussion, a list of specific action items and who is responsible for each, and when the next check-in will be.

If a decision was made, then that should be communicated to the right people. If feedback was given, then that should be acted upon. If ideas were generated, then the meeting organizer should clarify what the process is to take those to the next stage. These follow-ups can then anchor the agenda for when the group reconvenes.

Ten years before, in 2007, Leslie Kilgore had coined a phrase, which is now used across Netflix to describe exactly what Ted was doing as he walked out through the lobby of the hotel: “Lead with context, not control.” At just about any other company, with this much money on the table, the senior guy would get involved and control the negotiations. But that’s not what leadership looks like at Netflix. As Adam explained: “Ted wasn’t about to make that decision for me, but he set broad context to help align my thinking with the company’s strategy. That context he set laid the foundation for my decision.

Instead I reminded myself of what I often tell leaders throughout Netflix:

When one of your people does something dumb don’t blame them. Instead ask yourself what context 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?

During that QBR we discussed to what lengths we should go to in order to remain flexible. I provided some pre-reading that showed how bad we had been at predicting our growth in the past and how the best opportunities often can’t be predicted. We had breakout discussions looking at past cases where we could have paid more for an option that increased future choice or less for an option that reduced flexibility. We debated just how much flexibility we needed in our business and how much we should be ready to pay for it.

Those conversations didn’t lead to a clear conclusion or rule, but through the debates all our leaders became clearly aligned on the idea that preventing errors or saving money with long-term plans is not our primary objective. Our North Star is building a company that is able to adapt quickly as unforeseen opportunities arise and business conditions change.