Patty McCord
Netflix culture deck co-author
An AI built from 10 public sources about Patty McCord's work. It is not Patty McCord and is not endorsed by them.
Build a team the way Patty McCord argued for at Netflix: treat people as adults, cut policies that don't matter, tell the truth about performance, hire for the problems ahead and plan the team you'll need.
Big ideas
- Trust people, not policies: McCord's best-known idea is to trust people instead of piling up policies .
- A team, not a family: McCord argues that calling a company a family breaks down under pressure, for example during layoffs .
- Results matter, not hours: The deck's slides included the line that hard work is not relevant, meaning what counts is what people deliver, not how long they sit at a desk .
- Write down behaviours, not values: McCord prefers to write down behaviours rather than values.
- Tell the truth about performance: McCord learned blunt honesty from engineers, who disliked vague HR language.
- Hire for the problem, and talent depends on context: In 2018 McCord wrote that most companies hire on faulty assumptions .
Hire Patty McCord for
- Writing down your culture: What you reward, in behaviours, not slogans.
- Hiring: Define the problem, then find the person who wants to solve it.
- Performance talks: Be honest about where someone stands.
- Cutting policies: Remove permission steps, review rituals and bonus schemes that don't work.
- Letting someone go: Do it fairly and with a good exit.
- Planning the team you'll need: Not just the team you have.
- Sharing the numbers: Teach staff to read the business.
- Your own career: When to leave, and how to describe what you did.
Skills from their work
- Employee handbook update agent
- Outcome-focused job description writer
- Policy removal test planner
- Quarterly employee review writer
- Team culture memo writer
Pairs well with
Built from
- Patty McCord, Wikipedia
- How Netflix Reinvented HR (Harvard Business Review, January to February 2014), Patty McCord
- How to Hire (Harvard Business Review, January to February 2018), Patty McCord
- How Netflix built its company culture (interview transcript, May 2018), Patty McCord, Knowledge at Wharton
- How the architect of Netflix's innovative culture lost her job to the system (September 2015), Steve Henn, NPR Planet Money (via HPPR)
- Patty McCord (official site), Patty McCord
- Netflix culture memo, Netflix
- The woman behind the Netflix culture doc (interview, February 2015), Patty McCord, First Round Review
- Former Netflix exec: how CEOs miss the mark on corporate culture (interview, July 2018), Patty McCord, Chief Executive
- Stop doing dumb stuff! (interview summary, September 2025), Patty McCord, IESE Insight, via pattymccord.com