To combat this, I take several months off from interviews, calls, and meetings each year to create new products or write books without interruption. Being engaged in deep and focused work, because I’ve cut myself off from communication and availability to others, creates efficiency.

I use a handful of methods for setting context across the company, but my primary platforms are our E-staff (Executive Staff) and our Quarterly Business Review (QBR) meetings. A few times a year we bring together all the leaders (top 10 to 15 percent of people) of the company from around the world. It starts with a long meeting or dinner with my half dozen direct reports—people like Ted and Greg Peters and our head of HR Jessica Neal. Then I spend a day with E-Staff (all VPs and above) and then we have two days of presentations, sharing, and debates at QBR (all directors and above—about 10 percent of the entire workforce).

The number one goal for these meetings is to make sure that all leaders across the company are highly aligned on what I call our North Star: the general direction we are running in. 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.

Before and after QBR, we make available many dozens of pages of Google Docs memos to every employee, explaining all the context and content we shared at QBR. This information is read not just by QBR participants but also by people at all levels of the company, including administrative assistants, marketing coordinators, you name it.

Between QBRs, I hold ongoing one-on-one meetings to get a feel for how aligned we actually are and where context is lacking. I have one thirty-minute meeting with each director once a year. That makes about 250 hours of meetings with people who are three to five levels below me in the org chart. In addition, I meet with each vice president (two to three levels below me) for one hour every quarter. This results in another 500 hours of meetings annually. When Netflix was smaller, I met with each person more frequently, but I still spend about 25 percent of my annual time on all these meetings.

To this day, I continue to use a permutation of a bug book, though it has evolved into a systematic spreadsheet that I update daily. Each evening, before I fall asleep, I open a spreadsheet and insert three sets of information. First, I detail the ingredients of the day, how I spent my time. Second, I note how many “creative hours” I got into the day, which I track to ensure that they’re kept above 1,000 per every 365–day cycle (to sustain my rhythm of creative work). Third, I note the quality of the day, a score of how the day felt, on a plus-two, plus-one, zero, minus-one, minus-two scale. I also make notes when I get a plus-two day or a minus-two day about why the day proved exceptionally positive or exceptionally negative. Over time, I’m able to do sorts and correlations. What makes for plus-two days (super-positive days)? What makes for minus-two days (super-negative days)? What is the pattern? What changes can I make to get more plus-two and plus-one days and fewer minus-one and minus-two days? Forty years after I started the bug book, I remain a “scientist of the self” and continue to make dispassionate observations about the bug named Jim.

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The Life Cycle of a CEO— Claudius A. Hildebrand & Robert J. Stark

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Introduction

In fact, Dave hadn’t been the first choice for the CEO position, or even the second or third choice. Word was five others had been offered the job before him. What’s more, a couple of years earlier he’d been unceremoniously fired from his position as divisional president at a leading competitor. No one would have suggested from his educational background, either, that he was CEO material. Not only did he not have a degree from an elite school, but it also took him six years to graduate. He hated college and he’d dropped out for a time.

As Dave’s first year in the CEO seat progressed, the sneering assessments of that Florida night prevailed on the Street; the company’s stock slid 40 percent.

1. Dave Cote, Winning Now, Winning Later, Kindle ed. (New York: HarperCollins Leadership), 61.